The coordinates came through last minute. The instruction was to get there fast.

People organising demonstrations, blocking motorways and major intersections, did not want police getting wind of their plans.

The one we found ourselves at, near the town of Lod, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, felt a bit like a flash-mob protest, done and dusted in less than half an hour.

The protestors had set fire to tyres, which blazed across the motorway, filling the sky with thick black smoke.

They waved the Israeli flag and other yellow flags to show solidarity with the remaining hostages still in Gaza, whose photos they carried – their faces and names seared on the collective consciousness now – a collective trauma.

“We want the war to end, we want our hostages back, we want our soldiers back safe home, and we want the humanitarian disaster in Gaza to end”, one of the protestors told me.

“We do not want to have these crimes made in our name.”

And then she was gone, off to the next location as the group vanished in a matter of minutes, leaving police to put out the fire.

This was a day of stoppage, a nationwide strike – a change of tactics by the hostage families to up the ante with the government in their calls to stop the war, make a deal and bring the hostages home.

Benjamin Netanyahu was unmoved.

“Those who are calling for an end to the war today without defeating Hamas are not only hardening Hamas’s stance and delaying the release of our hostages, they are also ensuring that the horrors of October 7 will recur again and again”, he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.

Netanyahu ‘broke contract’ with us

Ahead of the day of strike action, we spoke to a former Air Force reservist who quit in April in protest over Netanyahu’s decision to break the ceasefire.

“I felt he hadn’t broken the contract with Hamas, he’d broken the contract with us – with the people, releasing the hostages, stopping the war. That was my breaking point.”

He wanted to be anonymous, identifying himself by the call sign ‘F’.

He had done three tours since the war began, mostly spent with eyes on Gaza – coordinating air strikes to support ground operations and ensuring the Air Force gets the target right.

‘This is eternal war’

“It’s very complicated, very demanding and very hectic. The main problem is to see that you follow the rules and there are lots of rules – safety rules, international law rules, military doctrine rules.

“And to see that there are no mistakes because you can check all the rules, you can make everything perfect, if there’s a mistake, it bypasses everything you did and the bomb would fall on someone you didn’t want it to fall on.”

I ask him how he feels about the huge death toll in Gaza.

“Look, the uninvolved death toll is tough. It’s tough personally, it’s tough emotionally, it’s tough professionally. It shouldn’t happen.

“When you conduct a war at this scale, it will happen. It will happen because of mistakes, because of the chaos of war.”

He is softly spoken, considered and thoughtful, but says he’s prepared to take part in the more radical protest actions, such as blocking motorways and starting fires, to try and get the message through.

Read more on Sky News:
‘More than 100 killed in a day’
Gaza’s hospitals ‘overwhelmed’
Madonna urges papal intervention

“Hamas is probably the weakest enemy we have had since 1948,” he says.

“In ’48, in the liberation of Israel, we fought seven armies, much better equipped, better ordered than us, and the war took less time.

“We stopped the war with Iran after 12 days. They are much more dangerous than Hamas. We stopped a war with Hezbollah in a couple of months, and they are still a much bigger threat than Hamas.

“You cannot eliminate a terror organisation to the last person. From my point of view, this way – this is eternal war.”

Truly, this is a moment as important as it is unusual. History does not provide us a guide here.

Never before have we seen so many world leaders gather at such short notice for a meeting like this at the White House, and with a president as consequential as he is unpredictable.

The speed with which it has been organised is remarkable. A diplomatic source has framed the hasty gathering as “organic”; the obvious next step after the Alaska summit, the source said.

The Europeans were not in the room for that. Today, they will dominate the room.

Is there a risk Donald Trump will feel encircled? I don’t think so. More likely, he will enjoy the moment, seeing himself as the great convener. And on that, he’d be right.

Whether his diplomatic process has been cack-handed or smart – and the debate there will rage on – there is no question he has created this moment of dialogue.

It was the unfolding, or unravelling, of another White House moment, back in February, which gives some key context for the day ahead.

That Trump-Zelenskyy Oval Office meltdown was a reality check for European leaders.

We all watched Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, slam the Ukrainian leader. It was excruciating but it was also instructive because, beyond the shouting, positions and attitudes were made clear.

That February meeting provided everyone with a crystallising sense of precisely who they were dealing with.

Since then, Europe and its key leaders have moulded and shifted their positions. Collectively they have transformed their own defence spending – recognising the necessity to stand on their own. And individually they have sought, urgently, to forge their own relationships with the US president.

Watch Sky News for continuous coverage from 5pm

Each of the leaders here today has worked hard (cringingly so, some might say) to get on the right side of Trump.

Whether it be Starmer and his state visit, Stubb and his golfing skills, Meloni and her Trump-aligned politics, or Rutte and his “daddy” comments, they have all appealed in different ways to Trump. They have done so precisely for moments like today.

In the hours ahead, we can expect Trump and Zelenskyy to meet with their respective delegations. We will probably see them together in the Oval Office. Brace for no repeat of February; Zelensky knows he played that badly.

Analysis and explainers:
How a chaotic 24 hours unfolded ahead of talks
Why Zelenskyy is taking a posse of leaders for talks

A repeat is unlikely not least because, in a typically Trumpian way, the American president appears to be agreeing now to the very thing he chastised Zelenskyy for requesting back in February – security guarantees before the war stops.

There will be plenty to look out for in the day ahead.

With Trump, the trivial matters as much as the detail, and very often the trivial can impact the detail. So will Zelenskyy wear a suit and tie, or at least a jacket? Remember the furore over his decision to stick to his war-time combat gear in February.

After that bilateral meeting, the wider meeting is expected. The central aim of this from a European perspective will be to understand what Trump is prepared to do in terms of guaranteeing Ukrainian security, and crucially what he and Putin discussed and agreed.

Is Putin really willing to accept some sort of American-European security pact for Ukraine? That sounds like NATO without the membership, so would that really fly with the Russian president?

Beyond that – what precisely did Trump and Putin discuss in terms of territorial swaps (more accurately described as control swaps because Ukraine would be negotiating away its own land)?

There is a concern that intentional ambiguity might allow for a peace deal. The different sides will interpret the terms differently. That could be fine short-term, providing Trump with a quick fix, but longer term it could be unsustainable and dangerous.

So above all, the European leaders’ tone to Trump will be one of flattery framed by a gentle warning.

They’ll tell him that he created this moment for peace; that it is his peace and that they want to work with him to keep it (and thus cement his legacy).

But to do that, they will tell him, they need his continued commitment to them; to Europe, not capitulation to Russia.

The bustle still exists in Hong Kong, but its tone is not the same. 

A city once famous for its protest, now simply doesn’t dare.

Just a few years ago it would have been hard to imagine a court case as high-profile as that of Jimmy Lai without at least a handful of supporters and placards.

But as closing arguments began in the trial of one of the city’s most well-known pro-democracy figures, there was not a hint of dissent in sight.

Now Lai’s son, Sebastien, who advocates on his behalf, has said that the treatment of his father will have dire implications for Hong Kong “as a a financial centre”, and has warned the British government (of which Lai is a citizen), that if it fails to act “my father is most likely going to die in jail”.

Jimmy Lai has been described as the most famous prisoner of conscience anywhere in the world.

He is an iconic figure within Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and is one of the most high-profile people to be charged under Hong Kong’s controversial national security law.

The self-made millionaire, lifelong critic of Beijing, and the owner of pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily is accused of colluding with foreign forces and publishing seditious material.

After a five-month adjournment, closing arguments in his trial will get under way in earnest this week.

There is a sense here that authorities have found this trial a little tricky to resolve.

How to handle an elderly man who some believe has become emblematic of a cause? How to balance significant international criticism with the city’s desire to assure the world it is just, fair and back open for business?

His family and lawyers believe this partly explains the multiple, lengthy adjournments.

Lai’s son, Sebastien, has spent years advocating for his father from London. He has not seen him in nearly five years.

“The worst-case scenario is that he dies in prison,” he says.

It is a legitimate concern. Lai has spent over 1,600 days in solitary confinement. He is 77 years old and diabetic.

Indeed, on Friday, the first day of the resumed court activity was taken up by discussions about his health and the court was then adjourned so he could be fitted with a heart rate monitor.

“In Hong Kong, it’s a concrete cell which gets up to 30, 40C and he bakes in there essentially,” says Sebastien.

“So we’re incredibly worried about him, and all of this in the last four years was aimed to break him, to break his spirit.”

‘If he dies, that’s a comma on Hong Kong’

Sebastien insists his father’s death would not just be a personal tragedy, but a huge problem for both the Hong Kong authorities and Beijing’s government.

“You can’t tell the world you have the rule of law, the free press and all these values that are instrumental to a financial centre and still have my father in jail,” he says.

“And if he dies, that’s it, that’s a comma on Hong Kong as a financial centre.”

It’s criticism that the authorities in Hong Kong are acutely aware of.

Indeed, the government there has insisted in a statement that the city’s “correctional facilities are humane and safe” and said that claims to the contrary are merely “external forces and anti-China media” working to “glorify criminal behaviour and exert pressure on the courts”.

But Lai is also a British citizen and there is a sense his family believes successive UK governments have failed in their duty to support him. Petitioning is a journey Sebastien describes as “heartbreaking”.

“It’s time to put actions behind words,” he says. “Without that, my father is most likely going to die in jail.”

It’s criticism that the authorities in Hong Kong are acutely aware of, the regional government claimed in a statement that “external forces and anti-China media” are actively working to “distort the truth, blatantly discredit the judicial system, in an attempt to glorify criminal behaviour”.

Read more:
Who is ‘prisoner of conscience’ Jimmy Lai?
Why Lai case is major sticking point for UK relations with China

Some believe the Lai trial is one of the final outstanding affairs in the wake of the crackdown on Hong Kong’s huge 2019 pro-democracy protests, actions the Beijing-backed authorities say were necessary to restore order and stability.

When you spend time in this city, it’s hard not to conclude those efforts have been remarkably successful. Any signs of dissent are now extremely hard to track down.

Tiny slogans graffitied in hidden places, a few independent bookstores still stocking political titles or young people choosing to not spend money in Hong Kong where possible is about as much as exists.

Meanwhile, the mainland Mandarin language is more commonly heard in the streets and slogans and banners extolling causes favoured by Beijing are not hard to find.

In today’s Hong Kong, stances are staked in quiet acts of compassion, such as committed visits to friends behind bars.

‘Don’t ever second-guess Beijing’

It’s on one of these trips we accompany Emily Lau, a former Hong Kong lawmaker and pro-democracy supporter.

“It’s very important to show the people inside that they have not been forgotten,” she explains, as she climbs into one of Hong Kong’s iconic red taxis.

“It’s my way of showing my support.”

She is visiting Dr Helena Wong, a fellow member of the Democratic Party, and one of the so-called ’47’ – 47 activists tried together for conspiracy to commit subversion.

Her key offence was standing in an unofficial primary election.

Lau is upbeat as we chat, but also frank about the state of democracy in her city.

“It’s very difficult. Now it seems you cannot demonstrate, you cannot march, you cannot petition,” she says. “And if you do post something online or some posts, you have to be very careful about what you say.

“I will never say we are finished, no, but right now, of course, it’s very difficult.”

We wait outside for her as she visits Dr Wong. She reports back that she’s in good spirits and was happy to see her friend.

Follow the World

Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday

Tap to follow

Their political party is in the process of disbanding, like every other pro-democracy group. The pressure has simply become too much, and she fears this isn’t the end.

“Don’t ever second-guess Beijing,” she says. “Don’t try.”

Indeed, the only political groups able to continue are those who at least tacitly support Beijing and its laws.

‘Not as bad as people think’

Ronnie Tong runs a think tank called Path of Democracy, which also sponsors people to run for office.

He bills it as a moderate force, but in reality, it has supported the National Security Law and all measures used to crack down on protesters.

“I don’t think it is as bad as people think,” he says. “The only thing they cannot say is to advocate succession or separatism.”

I ask if using the word ‘democracy’ in the group’s title feels a little ironic, given his voice is likely only permitted insofar as it does not criticise Beijing.

“No, I don’t think so,” he replies. “People have to understand that politics is also about personal relationships.”

That will likely not wash with many people here, but right now most feel they have no choice but to keep a low profile or move on.

The Lai trial is only one small part of Hong Kong’s story, but it’s a reflection of the rapid change here and a snapshot of a city adjusting.