The Nobel Peace Prize winner is set to be named on Friday, with Donald Trump and his administration having made clear more than once that they think the US president deserves the award.

The two-time president has been on a not-so-subtle Nobel Prize campaign for years, starting in his first term in office, when he said “many people” thought he deserved it.

In February this year, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, he said: “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”

After Israel and Hamas signed off on the first phase of Mr Trump’s peace plan on Thursday, people celebrating on the streets of Tel Aviv began calling for the US president to receive the prestigious honour.

But why does he think he should win, who has nominated him and how likely is it?

Why does Trump think he should get a Nobel Prize?

Mr Trump has suggested on several occasions that he has been instrumental in stopping multiple wars.

“I’ve done six wars, I’ve ended six wars,” he said on 18 August, during his summit with Ukrainian and European leaders. “If you look at the six deals I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires.”

The following day, in an interview with Fox News, he revised the number to seven wars. It’s a claim he went on to repeat last month, saying that no one had “ever done anything close to that”.

Dr Samir Puri, director of the Centre for Global Governance and Security at Chatham House, previously told Sky News: “There’s an absurdity to Trump’s claims, but like many of his claims, within the absurdity there are sometimes grains of truth.”

He suggested there was a “huge difference between getting fighting to stop in the short-term and resolving the root causes of the conflict,” and that Mr Trump’s interventions often amount to “conflict management” rather than conflict resolution.

Read more: The seven wars Trump claims to have ended

Has Trump been nominated?

The deadline for nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was on 31 January, not long after Mr Trump returned to the White House.

Over the course of his two terms in the Oval Office he has been nominated for the award more than 10 times – by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet, a Ukrainian politician, as well as legislators from the US, Sweden, and Norway.

However, a nomination does not guarantee someone will be a candidate and the prize committee does not publish a list of candidates before the winner is announced. They have said there are 338 candidates nominated this year, of which 244 are individuals and 94 are organisations.

It is not clear if any of Mr Trump’s nominations came before the January deadline.

Mr Netanyahu publicly nominated him in July, saying Mr Trump was “forging peace as we speak” in “one country and one region after the other”.

It came after Mr Trump took credit for stopping Iran and Israel‘s “12-day war” the month prior.

After Gaza agreement, could Trump actually win?

Experts have suggested that successfully pressuring Russia to end the war in Ukraine or Israel to stop its war in Gaza would make Mr Trump a viable candidate.

In a major development overnight on Wednesday, Israel and Hamas signed off on the first phase of Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan, and it was ratified by the Israeli government on Friday.

Mr Netanyahu said the breakthrough meant the remaining 48 hostages held by Hamas, 20 of whom are thought to still be alive, would be returned.

He added that the “great efforts of our great friend and ally President Trump” had helped them reach “this critical turning point”.

Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, has suggested the overnight developments in Gaza have come too late for Mr Trump.

“It’s highly unlikely that the overnight developments in Gaza will influence the Nobel Committee’s decision tomorrow [Friday],” she told Sky News. “By this stage, the laureate will already have been chosen, and speeches prepared ahead of Friday’s announcement.

“However, if Donald Trump’s 20-point plan will lead to a lasting and sustainable peace in Gaza, the committee would almost certainly have to take that into serious consideration in next year’s deliberations.

“Of course, they would also need to weigh that achievement against the broader record of his efforts to promote peace – both within the US and internationally – in line with Alfred Nobel’s will.”

Why experts think Trump is wrong for the prize

Alfred Nobel’s will, the award’s foundation, says the award should go to the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations”.

That is something Trump is not doing, according to Ms Graeger.

“He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization and from the Paris Accord on climate, he has initiated a trade war on old friends and allies,” she said.

“That is not exactly what we think about when we think about a peaceful president or someone who really is interested in promoting peace.”

During his second term, Mr Trump has also proposed measures that critics argue will hamper education and scientific research – two areas that are considered pillars of the Nobel Prize.

They include slashing the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, and plans to dismantle the Department of Education to shrink the federal government’s role in education in favour of more control by the states.

Ylva Engstrom, vice president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards three of the six Nobel prizes – for chemistry, physics and economics – says she believes Mr Trump’s changes are reckless and could have “devastating effects”.

“Academic freedom… is one of the pillars of the democratic system,” she says.

The Trump administration denies stifling academic freedom, arguing its measures will cut waste and promote scientific innovation.

Critics of Mr Trump also point to his controversial US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, through which the president has been sending troops to a string of Democratic-led cities to enforce his immigration laws.

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Even as the Gaza ceasefire was set to come into effect on Thursday, the president’s deployment of 300 National Guard troops to Chicago was leading to protests in the city centre.

The US military has also carried out at least four strikes on boats in recent weeks that the White House said belonged to cartels, including three it said originated from Venezuela.

The Trump administration said 21 people were killed in the strikes – but it has has yet to provide underlying evidence to lawmakers proving that the boats were carrying drugs.

Asle Toje, the deputy leader of the present Norwegian Nobel Committee, has suggested Mr Trump’s lobbying campaign for the prize may have had an opposing effect on his chances of winning.

“These types of influence campaigns have a rather more negative effect than a positive one, he says. “Because we talk about it on the committee. Some candidates push for it really hard and we do not like it.

“We are used to working in a locked room without being attempted to be influenced. It is hard enough as it is to reach an agreement among ourselves, without having more people trying to influence us.”

Who could win the prize?

The prize committee said there are 338 candidates nominated this year, of which 244 are individuals and 94 are organisations.

That’s up from last year, when there were 286 candidates.

Bookmakers have Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as one of the potential frontrunners, along with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died after allegedly being poisoned in a Russian jail.

Humanitarian organisations like Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms and Doctors Without Borders also have high odds.

The committee could give the award to UN institutions such as the International Court of Justice, or the UN as a whole, which is marking its 80th anniversary this year.

It could also reward the Committee to Protect Journalists or Reporters Without Borders, to mark a year in which more media workers than ever before were killed, predominantly in Gaza.

It could go to local mediators negotiating ceasefires and access to aid in conflicts, such as peace committees in the Central African Republic, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding or the Elders and Mediation Committee in El Fasher, Darfur.

The sun went down and the volume went up.

In the shadow of Chicago’s high-rise skyline, downtown streets reverberated with protest.

“Ain’t no power like the power of the people, and the power of the people don’t stop,” they chanted.

The president’s plan to deploy troops in the city brought hundreds to the streets in opposition.

They marched the full length of Michigan Avenue, flanked by a line of Chicago police officers.

This is a city on edge, the federal government taking on the state, both braced for a showdown.

Among the people I spoke to, there was no surprise about Donald Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, just outrage.

Asked why he’d joined the protest, a Vietnam veteran pointed to the word ‘Trump’ blazing in bright lights from a nearby hotel.

“That idiot right there, that’s why,” he said.

Read more: What is the Insurrection Act?

His message to the president: “Get the hell out of the White House, or we will put you out of it.”

“I’m on this march because I’m concerned the US is slipping away from democracy to authoritarianism,” another man told me.

One older woman said she was marching for her daughters and granddaughters, “because there isn’t going to be an America for them”.

“I don’t think he [Donald Trump] listens to anybody,” she added, “but doing nothing is not going to do anything so we got to do something.”

A young African American woman told me she felt compelled to march because immigration agents “taking people from their families just isn’t right”.

Shades of orange and pink reflected off the glass skyscrapers, casting long shadows on the streets where the threat of troop deployment looms.

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Hundreds of National Guard troops from Texas have set up camp at Elwood, an army training centre on the outskirts of Chicago.

Their presence drew a diverse crowd of protesters to the city centre – their faces lit by phone screens, voices raised and fists raised in defiance.

“No ICE, no fear,” they chanted, telling Immigration Customs Enforcement agents to leave Chicago.

“Immigrants are welcome here,” they repeated on cue from those wielding megaphones.

It was much more than the noise of protest. This was the pulse of a city fighting back.

A restless city, charged with tension, refusing to be silent.

A man has been arrested in connection with a deadly wildfire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood in Los Angeles, California.

Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, was detained for allegedly starting a fire on New Year’s Day that burned down much of the wealthy area a week later, acting US attorney Bill Essayli said.

The blaze, which erupted on 7 January, killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes and buildings in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy coastal neighbourhood. It burned down mansions with views of the ocean and central Los Angeles.

Rinderknecht allegedly started the fire after finishing his shift as an Uber driver.

He fled the scene of the original fire, but returned to the same trail where he had been earlier to watch it burn, according to Mr Essayli.

“He left as soon as he saw the fire trucks were headed to the location. He turned around and went back up there. And he took some video and, and watched them fight the fire,” Mr Essayli said

Rinderknecht made several 911 calls to report the fire, according to a criminal complaint.

During an interview with investigators on 24 January, Rinderknecht spoke of where the fire began – information that was not yet public and he would not have known if he hadn’t witnessed it, the complaint said.

The suspect was visibly nervous during the interview, according to the complaint.

His efforts to call 911 and a question to ChatGPT about a cigarette lighting a fire indicated he “wanted to preserve evidence of himself trying to assist in the suppression of the fire and he wanted to create evidence regarding a more innocent explanation for the cause of the fire,” the complaint added.

Investigators determined the fire was intentionally lit, likely by a lighter used on vegetation or paper, according to the criminal complaint. Authorities found a “barbecue-style” lighter inside the glove compartment of his car.

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Rinderknecht also lied about his location when the fire began, claiming he was near the bottom of the hiking trail, Mr Essayli said.

The fire was put out initially, but it continued to smoulder underground before reigniting during high winds a week later, Mr Essayli added.

Rinderknecht was arrested in Florida on Tuesday and will appear in court in the state on Wednesday.

He faces between five and 20 years in prison if convicted, according to the US Attorney’s Office.

“While we cannot undo the damage and destruction that was done, we hope his arrest and the charges against him bring some measure of justice to the victims of this horrific tragedy,” Mr Essayli said.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, said: “More than nine months ago, our city faced one of the most devastating periods our region had ever seen. Lives were tragically lost. Thousands of homes were destroyed.

“Our heroic firefighters fought the blaze valiantly with no rest. Each day that families are displaced is a day too long and as we are working tirelessly to bring Angelenos home, we are also working towards closure and towards justice – and today is a step forward in that process.”

Investigators are still to determine the cause of the Eaton Fire, which broke out the same day in the community of Altadena and killed 18 people.