Venezuelan opposition leader and pro-democracy campaigner Maria Corina Machado has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The committee praised her for “tireless work promoting democratic rights… and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

It said she had resisted death threats and been forced into hiding in her fight against President Nicolas Maduro – widely considered a dictator.

“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” Nobel added.

The committee said Ms Machado had stayed in Venezuela despite personal risk, calling it a “choice that has inspired millions of people”.

“Democracy depends on people who refuse to stay silent, who dare to step forward despite grave risk,” it said.

There was speculation Donald Trump had an outside chance despite nominations closing less then two weeks after he started his second term.

The president claims he has stopped seven wars since then – an assertion widely disputed – and last month said “everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also put the president’s name forward for the award in July.

The White House criticised the Nobel Prize committee’s decision on Friday.

“President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will,” spokesman Steven Cheung said in a post on X.

“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”

Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, told Sky News if Mr Trump’s Gaza peace deal leads to “a lasting and sustainable peace… the committee would almost certainly have to take that into serious consideration in next year’s deliberations”.

‘Extraordinary example of courage’

Ms Machado, 58, was lauded by the Nobel committee as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times”.

Her candidacy for last year’s election was blocked by the regime but she backed Edmundo Gonzalez, the leader of another party.

Opposition groups organised hundreds of thousands of volunteers to observe voting, despite risks to their safety, and ensured tallies were recorded “before the regime could destroy ballots and lie about the outcome”, added the Nobel committee.

President Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, claimed a third term despite exit polls pointing to a decisive opposition win.

He said his re-election was a triumph of peace and stability and claimed the electoral system was transparent.

Ms Machado disputed the result and said Edmundo Gonzalez had recorded an “overwhelming” victory.

The country’s highest court upheld the result but the UN said it wasn’t impartial or independent.

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state at the time, said America had “serious concerns”, while the UK said it was “concerned by allegations of serious irregularities in the counting”.

Nobel said Ms Machado first stood up for free and fair elections more than 20 years ago, when she called for “ballots over bullets”, and had campaigned on issues such as judicial independence and human rights.

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The committee painted a bleak picture of Ms Machado’s home country, saying many in Venezuela – which has the world’s largest oil reserves – live in serious poverty after it went from a “relatively democratic and prosperous country to a brutal, authoritarian state”.

“The violent machinery of the state is directed against the country’s own citizens,” it said, noting about eight million people had left the country – many of them heading north to try to enter America.

As a possible ceasefire takes shape, Palestinians face the prospect of rebuilding their shattered enclave.

At least 67,194 people have been killed, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, the majority of them (53%) women, children and elderly people.

The war has left 4,900 people with permanent disabilities, including amputations, and has orphaned 58,556 children.

Altogether, one in ten Palestinians has been killed or injured since the war began following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.

The attack killed 1,195 people, including 725 civilians, according to Israeli officials. The IDF says that a further 466 Israeli soldiers have been killed during the subsequent conflict in Gaza.

Swathes of Gaza have been reduced to rubble

More than 90% of Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced, many of them multiple times, following Israeli evacuation orders that now cover 85% of the Gaza Strip.

Few of them will have homes to return to, with aid groups estimating that 92% of homes have been destroyed.

“Despite our happiness, we cannot help but think of what is to come,” says Mohammad Al-Farra, in Khan Younis. “The areas we are going back to, or intending to return to, are uninhabitable.”

The destruction of Gaza is visible from space. The satellite images below show the city of Rafah, which has been almost totally razed over the past two years.

In just the first ten days of the war, 4% of buildings in Gaza were damaged or destroyed.

By May 2024 – seven months later – more than 50% of buildings had been damaged or destroyed. At the start of this month, it rose to 60% of buildings.

A joint report from the UN, EU and World Bank estimated that it would take years of rebuilding and more than $53 billion to repair the damage from the first year of war alone.

A surge in aid

Central to the promise of the ceasefire deal is that Israel will allow a surge of humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.

The widespread destruction of homes has left 1.5 million Palestinians in need of emergency shelter items.

Many of these people are living in crowded tent camps along Gaza’s coast. That includes Al Mawasi, a sandy strip of coastline and agricultural land that Israel has designated a “humanitarian zone”.

Aid agencies report that families are being charged rent of up to 600 shekels (£138) for tent space, and over $2,000 (£1,500) for tents.

Israel has forbidden the entry of construction equipment since the war began and has periodically blocked the import of tents and tent poles.

Restrictions on the entry of food aid have created a famine in Gaza City, and mass hunger throughout the rest of the territory.

Data from Israeli border officials shows that the amount of food entering Gaza has frequently been below the “bare minimum” that the UN’s famine-review agency says is necessary to meet basic needs.

As a result, the number of deaths from malnutrition has skyrocketed in recent months.

To date, Gaza’s health ministry says, 461 people have died from malnutrition, including 157 children.

“Will Netanyahu abide this time?”

As talks of a ceasefire progressed, the Israeli assault on Gaza City continued.

Footage shared on Tuesday, the two-year anniversary of the war, showed smoke rising over the city following an airstrike.

A video posted on Wednesday, verified by Sky News, showed an Israeli tank destroying a building in the city’s northern suburbs.

Uncertainty still remains over the future of Gaza, with neither Israel nor Hamas agreeing in full to the peace plan presented by US president Donald Trump. So far, only the first stage has been agreed.

A previous ceasefire, agreed in January, collapsed after Israel refused to progress to the agreement’s second stage. With that in mind, many in Gaza are cautious about their hopes for the future.

“Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time?,” asks Aya, a 31-year old displaced Palestinian in Deir al Balah.

“He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now.”

Additional reporting by Sam Doak, OSINT producer.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

When the peace deal came, it came quickly.

Rumours had been spreading over the course of the day, anticipation grew. A source told me that a deal would be done by Friday, another said perhaps by Thursday evening.

Israel and Hamas agree to peace deal – live updates

They were both wrong. Instead, it came much sooner, announced by Donald Trump on his own social media channel. Without being anywhere near the talks in Egypt, the president was the dominant figure.

Few will argue that he deserves the credit for driving this agreement. We can probably see the origins of all this in Israel’s decision to try to kill the Hamas leadership in Doha.

The attack failed, and the White House was annoyed.

Arab states started to express themselves to Trump more successfully, arguing that it was time for him to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu and bring an end to the war.

They repeated the call at a meeting during the UN General Assembly, which seems to have landed. When the president later met Netanyahu, the 20-point plan was born, which led to this fresh peace agreement.

Does it cover everything? Absolutely not. We don’t know who will run Gaza in the future, for a start, which is a pretty yawning hole when you consider that Gaza’s fresh start is imminent.

We don’t know what will happen to Hamas, or to its weapons, or really how Israel will withdraw from the Strip.

But these talks have always been fuelled by optimism, and by the sense that if you could stop the fighting and get the hostages home, then everything else might just fall into place.

In order to agree to this, Hamas must surely have been given strong assurances that, even at some level, its demands for Palestinian self-determination would bear fruit. Otherwise, why would the group have given up their one trump card – the 48 hostages?

Once they have gone, Hamas has no leverage at all. It has precious few friends among the countries sitting around the negotiating table, and it is a massively depleted fighting force.

So to give up that power, I can only assume that Khalil al-Hayya, the de facto Hamas leader, got a cast-iron guarantee of… something.

Arab states will greet this agreement with joy. Some of that is to do with empathy for the Palestinians in Gaza, where 67,000 people have been killed and more than 10% of the population has become a casualty of war.

But they will also welcome a path to stability, where there is less fear of spillover from the Gaza conflict and more confidence about the region’s economic and political unity.

Trump’s worldview – that everything comes down to business and deal-making – is welcomed by some of these leaders as a smart way of seeing diplomacy.

Jared Kushner has plenty of friends among these nations, and his input was important.

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For many Israelis, this comes down to a few crucial things. Firstly, the hostages are coming home. It is hard to overstate just how embedded that cause is to Israeli society.

The return of all 48, living and dead, will be a truly profound moment for this nation.

Secondly, their soldiers will no longer be fighting a war that, even within the higher echelons of the military, is believed to be drifting and purposeless.

Thirdly, there is growing empathy for the plight of the Gazans, which is tied to a fourth point – a realisation that Israel’s reputation on the world stage has been desperately tarnished.

Some will object to this deal and say that it is too weak; that it lets Hamas off the hook and fails to punish them for the atrocities of 7 October.

It is an accusation that will be levelled by far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government. It could even collapse the administration.

But for most people, in Israel, Gaza, across the Middle East and around the world, it is a moment of relief. Last week, I was in Gaza, and the destruction was absolutely devastating to witness.

Whatever the compromises, the idea that the war has stopped is, for the moment at least, a beacon of optimism.