Thousands of students rallied in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, after a Gaza ceasefire deal was announced, expressing solidarity with Palestinians and urging action to support those affected by the war.
United States President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Illinois is slated to face legal scrutiny at a pivotal court hearing.
On Thursday, US District Judge April Perry will hear arguments over a request to block the deployment of Illinois and Texas Guard members, a day after a small number of troops began protecting federal property in the Chicago area.
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Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and local officials strongly oppose the use of the Guard.
An “element” of the 200 Texas Guard troops that were sent to Illinois started working in the Chicago area on Wednesday, according to a US Northern Command spokesperson, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details not made public.
The spokesperson did not say where specifically the troops were sent.
The troops, along with about 300 from Illinois, arrived this week at a US Army Reserve Center in Elwood, southwest of Chicago. All 500 troops are under the Northern Command and have been activated for 60 days.
The Guard members are in the city to protect US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) buildings and other federal facilities and law enforcement personnel, according to Northern Command.
Chicago and Illinois on Monday filed a lawsuit to stop the deployments, calling them unnecessary and illegal.
Trump, meanwhile, has portrayed Chicago as a lawless “hellhole” of crime, though statistics show a significant recent drop in crime.
In a court filing in the lawsuit, the city and state say protests at a temporary ICE detention facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview have “never come close to stopping federal immigration enforcement”.
“The President is using the Broadview protests as a pretext,” they wrote. “The impending federal troop deployment in Illinois is the latest episode in a broader campaign by the President’s administration to target jurisdictions the President dislikes.”
The Republican president said Wednesday that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor Pritzker, both Democrats, should be jailed for failing to protect federal agents during immigration enforcement crackdowns.
Also Thursday, a panel of judges in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals was scheduled to hear arguments over whether Trump had the authority to take control of 200 Oregon National Guard troops. The president had planned to deploy them in Portland, where there have been mostly small nightly protests outside an ICE building.
State and city leaders insist troops are neither wanted nor needed there.
US District Judge Karin J Immergut on Sunday granted Oregon and California a temporary restraining order blocking the deployment of Guard troops to Portland. Trump had mobilised California troops for Portland just hours after Immergut first blocked him from using Oregon’s Guard.
The administration has yet to appeal that order to the 9th Circuit.
Immergut, whom Trump appointed during his first term, rejected the president’s assertions that troops were needed to protect Portland and immigration facilities, saying “it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in the city”.
The nearly 150-year-old Posse Comitatus Act limits the military’s role in enforcing domestic laws.
However, Trump has said he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to dispatch active duty military in states that are unable to put down an insurrection or are defying federal law.
Trump previously sent troops to Los Angeles and Washington, and a small number this week began assisting law enforcement in Memphis, Tennessee.
Those troops are part of the Memphis Safe Task Force, a collection of about a dozen federal law enforcement agencies ordered by Trump to fight crime in the city.
Deir el-Balah, Gaza – A cautious relief seems to hover over central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah as people stand outside their tents, talking to each other about the ceasefire that is set to come into force after approval by the Israeli cabinet.
Some people are celebrating, while others are worrying that this respite will prove brief and incomplete, like past ceasefires that Israel violated.
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This ceasefire has been touted by United States President Donald Trump as a lasting solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Israel has said it will cease bombing Gaza 24 hours after being approved by the Israeli cabinet, which is meeting on Thursday to discuss it.
Nasser al-Qernawi, 62, sat cradling his radio on the bed in his family’s shelter, patched together from plastic sheeting and a bit of blue tarp.
He has listened to it every day for the past two years, and seems almost in awe of the latest news he heard coming through it.
“Yesterday the news was tough, in the morning. But now, it’s better,” he said. “I feel it’s closer, but he didn’t say the word ‘peace’, Netanyahu didn’t. The others said the word ‘peace’, but he didn’t.
“So we’re still not sure what he’s thinking, but I think he’ll go with it… if Trump comes and he signs it, that’s it.”
Many hopes seem to be riding on Trump, either due to confidence in the US president’s diplomatic skills or to a deep distrust in the motivations and actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I have doubts about this, about 90 percent, because Netanyahu is a dirty traitor,” Khamis Othman, who has been displaced from Bureij camp, told Al Jazeera.
“He just thinks this is a winning card for executing his missions. The [Israelis could] take what is theirs and attack us again.”
In January, Hamas had released 33 Israeli and five Thai nationals who were held captive in Gaza as part of a ceasefire deal.
However, Israel unilaterally violated the ceasefire in mid-March, resuming its genocidal war on Gaza.
“If they truly cared about their captives,” Othman exclaimed, “they wouldn’t have attacked them along with the resistance fighters.”
Regardless, he seems at least willing to wait and see what happens next: “From what we last heard, they’re saying Friday is when it happens, so hopefully, on Friday, it’ll start.”
Ilham al-Zaanin (Umm Mahdi), 60, has been displaced with her five children and 10 grandchildren since the war began, and has mixed feelings about this announcement.
On the one hand, she told Al Jazeera, she is filled with relief that the bloodshed may now stop, yet on the other hand, she is mourning the fact that they cannot go back home.
Umm Mahdi and her family are from Beit Hanoon in the northernmost governorate of Gaza, a zone that will remain occupied by the Israeli army during the first phase of the ceasefire, so the family will be displaced, and she doesn’t know for how long.
“We went back to our house in Beit Hanoon during the [January] truce,” Umm Mahdi said. “Our home was gone, though, everything was gone. So we came back here and are staying with my husband’s family.
“Everything is destruction, loss … God compensate and help everyone; everyone has their own affliction … honestly, we’re hurting,” she said sadly.
The hurt is afflicting all generations in Gaza, her cousin Itidal al-Zaanin (Umm Mohammad) said, pointing to her grandchildren whose future, she fears, is already lost.
“My son’s children, instead of dreaming of what they want to be when they grow up or playing with toys, they’re walking around with knives, carrying heavy water jugs over long distances to sell.
“Some days they come and tell me and their mother about the human remains they see flung around after attacks … ‘Grandma we found them in pieces,’ they would tell me,” Umm Mohammad shook her head.
“Tomorrow we’ll be shocked by the real numbers of the martyrs and the wounded and the missing, those under the rubble,” Umm Mahdi said.
“Over these two years, I’ve seen everything imaginable, everything painful. We saw slaughter, death, trucks full of dead people, animal carts.”
Everyone who spoke to Al Jazeera expressed happiness and relief that, at the very least, the bloodshed would stop and some people would have an opportunity to return to their homes, or what remains of them.
Othman is going to wait and see.
“You hear it so often … there’s been an accomplishment, then it fails … optimism is something that sits in the shadows,” he said.
Umm Mahdi is also waiting to see: “[Israel] cannot be trusted. You see, in Lebanon, they bomb them every day. We hope that the mediators will intervene to preserve our safety.
Even in the best-case scenario, Umm Mohammad isn’t sure anything will be the same again.
“My sisters lost their children, and our homes were destroyed. Our lives and our whole future have been lost. There’s no true joy in our hearts, but at least the bloodshed stopped,” she said.
“We’ve been begging Arab nations, foreign countries and Muslims who share our faith for two years, but no one cared about us or our children, children who saw bodies torn apart near Al-Aqsa Hospital, and who saw children like them, martyrs.”
Al-Qernawi held on to his optimism about as tightly as he held his radio, which has kept him company in more ways than one through two years of genocide.
“People come to listen with me sometimes, my daughters, or our neighbours,” he said.
“God willing, people will go back to their homes. God willing, the war is over,” al-Qernawi insisted.
“The whole purpose of the war and resuming it was all about displacement.
Turkiye’s President Erdogan says Ankara will join a ground task force to monitor the Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as part of a US-brokered deal under President Trump. He added Turkiye will also help rebuild Gaza under the new truce.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has told his Azerbaijani counterpart that Moscow will compensate Azerbaijan for its part in accidentally downing an Azerbaijani passenger plane last year, which had damaged relations between the two countries.
The Russian leader made the commitment on Thursday while meeting with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 10 months after the Azerbaijani Airlines crash that killed 38 of the 67 people on board and strained ties between the neighbours.
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Azerbaijani authorities had said the jet, en route from Baku to the Chechen capital Grozny, on December 25, 2024, was mistakenly hit by Russian air defence fire. The pilots then attempted an emergency landing in western Kazakhstan, but the plane crashed near Aktau, across the Caspian Sea.
Baku authorities also accused Moscow of denying the distressed aircraft permission to land in Russian territory, forcing the failed landing attempt in Kazakhstan.
Putin apologised for the “tragic incident” at the time but did not directly take responsibility on Russia’s behalf.
On Thursday, however, he acknowledged Russia’s role more explicitly, saying Russian air defence missiles had detonated several metres from the plane after Ukrainian drones entered Russian airspace.
He said Russia would provide Azerbaijan with appropriate compensation and ensure an “objective assessment” of the incident.
“Of course, everything that is required in such tragic cases will be done by the Russian side on compensation and a legal assessment of all official things will be given,” Putin told Aliyev in their first face-to-face meeting in a year. “It is our duty, I repeat once again … to give an objective assessment of everything that happened and to identify the true causes.”
Aliyev thanked Putin for monitoring the progress of an investigation into the deadly incident. “I would like to express my gratitude once again for the fact that you deemed it necessary to highlight this issue at our meeting,” Aliyev told the Russian president.
The jet crash had contributed to months of strained relations between the two former Soviet Republics.
EXPLAINER
In the early hours of Wednesday morning in Gaza, United States President Donald Trump announced that Hamas and Israel had agreed on the first phase of his ceasefire and captive-exchange plan.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump stated : “ALL the hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their troops to an agreed upon line.”
The “agreed upon line” refers to a vague map shared by Trump on October 4, showing an initial Israeli withdrawal zone marked in yellow, later dubbed the “yellow line” by Trump officials.
After negotiations, Israel has agreed to the initial withdrawal line, which we have shown to, and shared with, Hamas. When Hamas confirms, the Ceasefire will be IMMEDIATELY effective, the Hostages and Prisoner Exchange will begin, and we will create the conditions for the next… pic.twitter.com/0VfaMSOqQ1
By Sunday or Monday, Hamas is expected to release about 20 living captives, along with the bodies of about 25 others, while Israel will free some 2,000 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons. Final details have yet to be confirmed.
Israel currently controls more than 80 percent of Gaza’s 365sq km (141sq miles) area, including areas under forced evacuation orders or designated by Israel as military zones.
Once the deal is signed, fighting would be expected to end immediately, and Israeli forces would withdraw to the line marked in yellow.
The final map has not yet been published following negotiations in Egypt, but based on the October 4 map, the area inside the yellow line represents approximately 155sq km (60sq miles), leaving about 210sq km (81sq miles), or 58 percent of Gaza, under Israeli control, as verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad team.
Most notably, Israeli forces will remain in several previously populous Palestinian neighbourhoods, including:
In addition, Israel will continue to control all crossings in and out of Gaza, including the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced multiple times throughout two years of war and are desperate to return to their homes, but the continued Israeli presence in these areas makes that unlikely in the near term.
According to the 20-point plan announced by Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on September 29 – developed without any Palestinian input – Israel is to withdraw its forces in three phases, as shown on an accompanying crude map, with each phase marked in a different colour:
Even after the third withdrawal phase, Palestinians will be confined to an area which is smaller than before the war, continuing a pattern of Israel’s control over Gaza and its people.
Many questions remain about how the plan will be implemented, the exact boundaries of Palestinian territory, the timing and scope of Israeli withdrawals, the role of the International Stabilization Force, and the long-term implications for Palestinians across both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.