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cease-fire
Trump’s Manual for Not Turning a Cease-Fire Into a Lasting Peace
The U.S. president’s unholy affection for both Putin and Netanyahu will produce only the worst kind of cease-fire, the kind that the strong use as a prelude to their final push to eliminate the weak.
Mar 29, 2025
Israel has resumed its aerial bombardment of Gaza. The latest cease-fire, which lasted two months and led to the release of 33 Israeli hostages and 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, never made it out of its first stage. The Israeli government has now adopted a strategy of inflicting overwhelming violence until Hamas capitulates by releasing the remaining hostages.
Ukraine and Russia have accepted a limited cease-fire. Both sides have agreed to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure, but neither has actually adhered to this condition. U.S. President Donald Trump, who coaxed both sides toward this cease-fire, is reportedly furious. This week, Moscow and Kyiv agreed to extend this partial cease-fire to the Black Sea, though here, too, they don’t seem in a rush to stop their attacks. No serious analysts, including those in Russia, expect this cease-fire to hold.
A United Nations-brokered truce in Yemen lasted nearly six months in 2024 before fighting in the country between the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government started up again in the fall. The Trump administration has recently escalated air strikes against the Houthis in response to their revived efforts to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea.
Donald Trump promised that he would, like some authoritarian father figure, force warring parties in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere to stop fighting and get along. Only the credulous believe in this avatar of Trump as peacemaker.
Last year, a cease-fire in Syria came to an end when rebels, with the go-ahead from Turkey, caught government troops by surprise when they seized Aleppo and kept going. A little more than a week later, they were in control of the capital of Damascus and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was on his way to Moscow.
Cease-fires have come and gone in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last week, the DRC and Rwanda called for a cease-fire in the eastern part of the country. An astonishing 700,000 people have been displaced by fighting just since January. The record of truces in this war-torn country does not give much hope for this latest initiative.
In other countries, the mutual hostility between the warring parties has been so intense that cease-fires don’t even get a chance to take hold. Sudan, split in two by government forces and the rebel Rapid Support Forces, has so far resisted international calls for immediate humanitarian pauses in the violence.
Cease-fires don’t always fail. Libya hasn’t seen any major violation of the cease-fire signed in 2020. But it’s the only success of the three cease-fires that the Borgen Project cited in October 2022 as evidence of a more peaceful world. The civil war in Sudan resumed in April 2023. Later that year, Azerbaijan broke a cease-fire to defeat Armenia and seize control of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Donald Trump promised that he would, like some authoritarian father figure, force warring parties in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere to stop fighting and get along. Only the credulous believe in this avatar of Trump as peacemaker. The truth is, cease-fires are usually just empty promises, regardless of how smart, powerful, or delusional the mediator-in-chief happens to be.
What makes some cease-fires endure even as so many others disappear into the fire of renewed hostilities?
Why Cease-Fires Die
When he responded to Trump’s peace proposal for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “We are in favor of it but there are nuances.”
Those “nuances” were sticking points as sharp as a saber. Putin wants the world to recognize his illegal seizure of four Ukrainian provinces over which he doesn’t even have full control. He wants all foreign military assistance and intelligence sharing with Ukraine to end. NATO membership for Ukraine must be off the table. Oh, and he also wants the world to lift sanctions against his country.
Putin believes that he has an advantage on the battlefield and, with Trump as president, at the negotiating table as well. There is some truth to Putin’s perception. Russia has more soldiers and resources at its disposal than does Ukraine, and Trump is the most pro-Russian president that the United States has ever produced. Putin also knows that the celebrated dealmaker is actually a naïf who pays little attention to details and has been taken to the cleaners in the past, most notably by the Taliban in its 2020 deal with the United States.
But Russia, too, has reached certain limits in its capacity to recruit soldiers and produce the armaments to continue its occupation of Ukraine. Mutual exhaustion is one of the best signs of a cease-fire that can endure. That was certainly the case with the two Koreas in 1953 after two years of relatively little territorial movement by either side.
But both parties to the conflict have to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that they have sunk into a quagmire. Putin, by contrast, thinks that he can prevail. He wants not only those four provinces but the entirety of what he calls “Novorossiya,” which includes all of Ukraine’s southern coast, which would render the country land-locked. Putin also wants elections that can replace Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a more malleable leader.
Any cease-fire that doesn’t lead to Putin achieving these ultimate goals is a cease-fire that Russia is unlikely to uphold.
A power-besotted aggressor who believes that he—and isn’t it always a he?—has an asymmetric advantage over his opponent is one of the leading reasons why it’s difficult to stop wars. Cease-fires for these aggressors are only pauses to regroup or to win international approval or to lull opponents into complacency.
That applies to Benjamin Netanyahu as well. Israel and Hamas have been locked in a conflict over Gaza for more than two decades. On October 7, the much weaker Hamas launched a brutal surprise attack on Israeli territory that killed more than 1,000 people and produced 250 hostages, which the Palestinian group figured it could use as bargaining chips. Instead of negotiating, the Netanyahu government launched its own brutal response, which has left 50,000 dead in Gaza.
Like Putin, Netanyahu has maximalist ambitions and an uncompromising attitude. He wants to destroy Hamas. He also wants to destroy the capacity of Gaza to serve as a part of some future Palestinian state. He doesn’t really care about the hostages that Hamas is holding. The Israeli leader is so determined to prove that Hamas is using Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians alike as human shields that he’ll sacrifice them both in his bid to annihilate Hamas and, of course, maintain his own political position. To add grievous insult to catastrophic injury, he’ll then accuse the Palestinian group of human rights abuses after the fact.
A huge number of Israelis are fed up. This last weekend, 100,000 turned out to protest in the major cities.
Getting to Peace
Most cease-fires fail, often spectacularly so. “Of the 105 failed cease-fires, 84% were followed by an offensive within an average of just 13 days,” reports Patrick Burke in his study of cease-fires in 25 wars from 1947 to 2016. According to a study by Jason Quinn and Madhav Joshi, 80% of cease-fires fail.
Mutual exhaustion on the battlefield is certainly one factor behind a successful cease-fire. But what can mediators do when one or both sides believe that they can still achieve a complete victory, as Croatia did with Operation Storm in 1995 and Azerbaijan accomplished more recently?
Trump’s approach is to strong-arm the weaker party. He cut off military aid to Ukraine, trash-talked its leader, and forced the country to accept a partial cease-fire. With the latest deal on the Black Sea, he is dangerously close to agreeing to lift some restrictions on Russian exports without approval from Ukraine or the European Union. Such a cease-fire is not likely to last or to lead to a second stage.
Putin is no doubt watching Netanyahu, taking careful notes, and identifying lessons to learn:
- Lesson one: Break previous agreement
- Lesson two: Flatter Trump
- Lesson three: Apply maximum firepower
- Lesson four: Ignore international opinion
From a conflict resolution point of view, a more successful approach would be to identify the underlying reasons for the dispute—competition for resources, historical grudges, cultural differences—and find ways of nudging the parties toward addressing those root causes nonviolently. But this approach assumes a certain power balance among the combatants.
It’s hard to imagine Trump, Netanyahu, or Putin being very interested in such a process. They don’t believe in talk therapy. They believe in power moves.
Where one side has an obvious advantage, an outside force could try to level the playing field. That requires arm-twisting not the weaker party but the stronger one. That’s what the United States did to get Serbia to the table and sign the Dayton Accords to end the war in Bosnia.
Ah, but didn’t the West follow just such a strategy with Russia during the current conflict? All the sanctions against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine and resolutions at the U.N. only made Putin fight harder. These punitive actions were taken to help Ukraine repel the invaders and uphold the principles of international law. In other words, the international community has had a stake in the conflict, since Russia didn’t just seize Ukrainian territory, it defied a collective global norm.
With Israel, of course, the Biden administration did little or nothing to restrain Netanyahu. The Trump administration has only encouraged the Israeli leader. Trump’s scenario of a Gaza resort with no Palestinians, however ridiculous it sounds, served notice that the United States would be okay with a genocidal push of all Palestinians from their land.
So, perhaps in some contexts, cease-fires are just bound to fail.
But don’t despair. Remember that 80% failure rate from Jason Quinn and Madhav Joshi? Believe it or not, these researchers were actually encouraged by the results of their analysis of data from 196 conflicts between 1975 to 2011.
“What we found was that the best predictor that any one cease-fire agreement will be successful—and by successful I mean: not followed by renewed conflict or violence—… is how many failed peace agreements came before,” Jason Quinn noted. He pointed to the ultimate successes in ending wars in Nepal and Colombia as important examples.
Wars are hard to end. Exhibit A: The Hundred Years War. It makes sense that cease-fires are bound to fail and fail and fail and fail and fail until one day, they produce a lasting peace. Skilled mediators, a power move or two, mutual exhaustion on the battlefiel and at the negotiating table: These can all eventually lead to success.
But one thing is for sure. Trump’s unholy affection for both Putin and Netanyahu will produce only the worst kind of cease-fire, the kind that the strong use as a prelude to their final push to eliminate the weak.
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Dispatch From Gaza and the War That Never Ends
With the resumption of airstrikes and further degradation to what little infrastructure remains, the conditions of our existence are almost beyond description, though I will still try.
Mar 26, 2025
There is a fleeting moment, just before waking, when silence blankets the world. A moment where you are still held in sleep, shielded from the harshness of reality. But then, the silence is ripped away. The ground shakes beneath you. The sky erupts in light and fire. Walls tremble. Screams cut through the night. And suddenly, you are awake—not to the promise of a new day, but to devastation and fear.
This is Gaza’s reality—a war that never ends, a war that offers no respite, no mercy. On March 18, Israel resumed bombing Gaza, confirming that the so-called cease-fire, which began on January 19, was never more than a hollow promise. The bombings never really stopped. Gaza’s borders remained sealed. Humanitarian aid was blocked. Hunger deepened. Hospitals were pushed to the brink. Families were left to sleep in the ruins of their homes, or in overcrowded shelters without enough food or water. Even during Ramadan, the holiest month, Israel tightened its grip, ensuring that 2.1 million people were left without the essentials needed to survive.
This time, the war is taking an even darker turn. We had already been living without the basic necessities to survive… no housing, little food, fuel, or water. With the resumption of airstrikes and further degradation to what little infrastructure remains, the conditions of our existence are almost beyond description, though I will still try. Civilians are once again being killed indiscriminately. Journalists, children, and aid workers—those trying to document the truth and help the wounded, and those most vulnerable—are being targeted. At least 25 journalists have been killed since the latest round of attacks began. Some were killed while reporting from the ground, others targeted inside their homes. Khaled Abu Saif, a young journalist known for his fearless coverage of Gaza’s suffering, was killed when an Israeli airstrike hit the building where he lived. His camera was found next to his body, shattered by the same blast that killed him.
We were told the war had ended. We were told there was a cease-fire. But the bombs never stopped. The loss never ended. Now, we no longer ask when the war will end—we only ask how much more we can survive.
Children, as usual in Israel’s wars on us, have not been spared. On the first night of the resumed bombings, more than 130 children were killed. Some died in their sleep, buried beneath the rubble of their homes. Others were hit while playing outside. The youngest victims are too numerous to count. Families are digging through the ruins with their bare hands, trying to recover the bodies of their sons and daughters. They are not even given the dignity of a proper burial—the graveyards are full, and there is nowhere left to lay the dead to rest.
Aid workers are targets. Ambulances marked with the Red Crescent symbol are being bombed. Shelters clearly designated as humanitarian spaces are again targeted by Israeli missiles. Medical staff have been slaughtered while trying to reach the wounded. In one tragic case, three paramedics were killed when their ambulance was struck as they responded to an emergency call.
And now I must try to describe the horror that those of us still living must endure. There is no clean place left in Gaza. The streets are choked with the stench of rotting garbage and decaying bodies. Mountains of waste rise between collapsed buildings and broken roads. Flies swarm over the debris. Dogs sniff through the rubble and gnaw on human limbs and flesh. The air is thick with the sour smell of decay and smoke. Gaza, already suffocating under siege and war, is now drowning under its own waste.
Once again, tens of thousands of families have been forced to flee their homes in northern Gaza, seeking refuge in the already overcrowded central and southern areas. But there are no proper shelters left. Every school, mosque, and hospital that once offered refuge has been bombed or turned into a makeshift camp for the displaced. With nowhere else to go, many families have ended up on the edges of waste dumps—setting up tents or makeshift shelters among piles of garbage.
Children play barefoot in fields of trash. Families sleep next to rotting food, broken plastic, and the carcasses of dead animals. With the borders closed and humanitarian aid blocked, Gaza’s waste management system has collapsed. Garbage trucks no longer operate because there is no fuel. The sanitation system has completely broken down. Medical waste from overwhelmed hospitals and human waste from destroyed sewage systems now flow through the streets. Disease is spreading quickly—cases of cholera, dysentery, and skin infections are increasing daily.
“I wake up every day to the smell of rot,” says Abu Mohammed, a father of five who fled from Beit Hanoun to central Gaza. “We left our home because of the bombs, but now we are living among trash. My children are getting sick. There’s no clean water to wash them. We barely have food to eat. And the smell… it never goes away.”
In the few hospitals still functioning, doctors are warning of a major health crisis. Children are arriving with respiratory infections from breathing the polluted air. Cases of poisoning from contaminated food and water are on the rise. Infections from untreated wounds—often caused by the debris of collapsed buildings—are becoming more dangerous because antibiotics and medical supplies have run out.
“We are living like animals,” says Um Ayman, a mother of four sheltering near a waste dump in central Gaza. “I have to cover my children’s noses with pieces of cloth so they don’t breathe the poisoned air. We sleep surrounded by flies. My youngest child has a rash all over his body. There are no doctors left to treat him.”
If we were the “animals” that Israel says we are, would our suffering be any less? Even animals have their limits. We reached ours a long time ago, and still we keep going.
The humanitarian disaster is deepening, and the accumulation of waste is making an already desperate situation even worse. The people of Gaza cannot escape the bombs, but now they cannot even escape the rot beneath their feet. Clean water is running out. Food is scarce. Medical aid is blocked. And as the waste piles grow higher, so does the threat of disease and death.
There is no safety in Gaza. No one is spared. Journalists trying to tell the truth, children caught in the crossfire, and aid workers struggling to save lives—all are targets.
We were told the war had ended. We were told there was a cease-fire. But the bombs never stopped. The loss never ended. Now, we no longer ask when the war will end—we only ask how much more we can survive.
The world is watching Gaza slip further into devastation. The targeting of those who speak, those who heal, and those who are too young to understand why this is happening—this is not collateral damage. It is a deliberate effort to silence the truth and crush the human spirit. The world cannot remain silent any longer.
I say this: What is happening to us is beyond words and beyond the most wild and outrageous of imaginations. Those who support this genocide, those who look away, and those who remain silent for the sake of their comfortable lives will be judged and must be held accountable. Someday. I pray for that day, that day when the world finally sees us, that day when the world rises up to finally stop Israel and stop the mass murder of me and my people.
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'Child After Child': Israel Has Killed 270+ Gaza Children Since Ditching Cease-Fire Last Week, Says NGO
"Children and families in Gaza have barely caught their breath and are now being plunged back into a horrifically familiar world of harm that they cannot escape," said Save the Children's regional director.
Mar 25, 2025
Since fully abandoning a two-month cease-fire in the Gaza Strip a week ago, the Israel Defense Forces have slaughtered more than 270 children in the Palestinian enclave, the global charity Save the Children said on social media Tuesday.
"Bombs falling, hospitals destroyed, children killed, and the world is silent. No aid, no safety, no future," said Save the Children humanitarian director Rachael Cummings. The group also noted that the death toll since October 2023 has topped 50,000.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Tuesday that since March 18, the IDF has killed at least 792 people and injured 1,663, bringing the totals over the past 18 months to 50,144 dead and 113,704 wounded. Thousands more are missing and presumed dead.
On Monday, Drop Site News' Sharif Kouddous reported that the ministry "released a 1,516-page document listing the names of over 50,000 Palestinians confirmed killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. There are a total of 474 pages listing 15,600+ children's names. The first 27 pages the age is listed as 0—children under 1 year old."
In addition to the 876 infants under age 1, Drop Sitedetailed on social media, the IDF has killed at least 1,686 toddlers (1-2 years), 2,424 preschoolers (3-5 years), 5,745 elementary school students (6-12 years), 2,837 young teens (13-15 years), and 2,045 older teens (16-17 years).
The outlet noted that "this toll does not include deaths from indirect causes such as starvation, disease, or the thousands still missing under the rubble. Researchers have said the actual toll could be three to five times higher."
The Associated Pressreported Tuesday that "when the first explosions in Gaza this week started around 1:30 am, a visiting British doctor went to the balcony of a hospital in Khan Younis and watched the streaks of missiles light up the night before pounding the city."
Dr. Sakib Rokadiya then headed to Nasser Hospital's emergency ward, which soon filled with people harmed by the strikes. "Just child after child, young patient after young patient," he said. "The vast, vast majority were women, children, the elderly."
The AP shared more accounts from healthcare providers at the largest hospital in southern Gaza, including Dr. Feroze Sidhwa:
Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon from California with the medical charity MedGlobal, rushed immediately to the area where the hospital put the worst-off patients still deemed possible to save.
But the very first little girl he saw—3 or 4 years old—was too far gone. Her face was mangled by shrapnel. "She was technically still alive," Sidhwa said, but with so many other casualties "there was nothing we could do."
He told the girl's father she was going to die. Sidhwa went on to do some 15 operations, one after another.
When Israel fully ditched the cease-fire last week, after many violations since mid-January, Ahmad Alhendawi, Save the Children's regional director, said that "children and families in Gaza have barely caught their breath and are now being plunged back into a horrifically familiar world of harm that they cannot escape."
"These airstrikes come as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain displaced, their homes destroyed and uninhabitable, with tents all that stand between them and explosive weapons designed for wide reach," he pointed out. "Children are the most vulnerable to explosive weapons. Their lighter bodies are thrown further by the blasts, and their bones are softer and bend more easily, with higher risk of secondary injuries and long-term deformities and disabilities. Their small bodies have less blood to lose—a death sentence when emergency services can't safely operate and reach them."
"Children who survive the onslaught will not be able to receive adequate medical care or even basic pain medication, following the government of Israel's restrictions on and denial of medical supplies and the fuel hospitals need to function," Alhendawi continued. "This cannot be what world powers allow children to return to. When children are slaughtered en masse, humanity's moral and legal foundations crumble. We have seen it for ourselves: The only way to ensure children and families are protected as international law requires is through a cease-fire. This time, it must be definitive—the constant threat of war cannot be left hanging over their heads."
He added that "until then, even wars have laws, and those laws are clear. Civilians must be actively protected, with concrete steps taken to avoid and minimize civilian casualties. There is no military imperative that can justify atrocity crimes. And the international community must use all available means—exhaustively, not selectively—to ensure international law is upheld. Anything less is a global failure—not a mistake, not a regrettable dilemma, but a total dereliction of legal duty. Failure to act now risks the annihilation of children and their futures."
Global demands for a renewed cease-fire have mounted over the past week as Israel has returned to a full-blown military assault, backed by a U.S. government now controlled by President Donald Trump and Republican majorities in Congress.
"During the 42-day cease-fire families in Gaza could finally fall asleep knowing their loved ones would still be beside them when they woke up," Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam's policy lead for the occupied Palestinian territories, said Monday. "Even though aid that entered was not enough—far from enough—it was something. The price of food stabilized. Supermarkets reopened. Bakeries began running again. Many people even went to their homes or what was left of it, and tried to repair and rebuild, however little they could."
Khalidi explained that "Oxfam, through its partners has been able to initiate emergency water trucking across the Gaza Strip, and are maintaining some other aid programs, such as multipurpose cash transfers, despite the severe challenges that all humanitarian workers now face around lack of protection."
"For the past 535 days, Israel has been systematically weaponizing lifesaving aid, inflicting collective punishment upon the population of Gaza," she continued. "The denial of food, water, fuel and electricity is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Many within the international community are enabling this by their silence, inaction, and complicity."
Oxfam called for a permanent cease-fire, the safe return of Israeli hostages and illegally detained Palestinian prisoners, "unfettered aid at scale," and other governments to stop transferring arms to the involved parties. The group also said that "we reiterate our call for justice and accountability for all those affected."
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court in November issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas leader who has since been confirmed dead.
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