Middle East Cease-Fires Matter Even When They’re Broken
An uneasy cease-fire of a kind holds in the Middle East. The United States and Iran have stepped down the volume of hostilities since the cease-fire that began on April 8. In Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah never really stopped fighting but did significantly reduce the intensity of combat. But how much are these “pauses” worth? Are they likely to last, and will they lead to a more durable and complete peace agreement? In a region where cease-fires often seem to be just smoke and mirrors that precede another round of fighting, it can be easy to dismiss them altogether—but even when they don’t hold, they still have value.
In general, it is difficult to predict what U.S. President Donald Trump will do, but there are lessons to be found in looking at Israel’s position and past cease-fires between Israel and its adversaries in these two and a half years of war—and maybe some hope for more modest benefits.
An uneasy cease-fire of a kind holds in the Middle East. The United States and Iran have stepped down the volume of hostilities since the cease-fire that began on April 8. In Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah never really stopped fighting but did significantly reduce the intensity of combat. But how much are these “pauses” worth? Are they likely to last, and will they lead to a more durable and complete peace agreement? In a region where cease-fires often seem to be just smoke and mirrors that precede another round of fighting, it can be easy to dismiss them altogether—but even when they don’t hold, they still have value.
In general, it is difficult to predict what U.S. President Donald Trump will do, but there are lessons to be found in looking at Israel’s position and past cease-fires between Israel and its adversaries in these two and a half years of war—and maybe some hope for more modest benefits.
By our count, since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, onslaught ignited a regional war, no fewer than seven cease-fires have been declared between Israel and its neighbors, including three in Gaza (once in 2023 and twice in 2025), two in Lebanon (2024 and 2026), and two in Iran (2025 and 2026). These cease-fires rarely stop the fighting for long—sometimes mere days—and inevitably, once exchanges of fire occur, diplomatic and media debates erupt over who broke them first. Such debates usually track with preexisting narratives about power and responsibility: who started the war, who broke the peace, and which side is responsible for the ongoing violence.
Public observers, especially in the West, often assume that a cease-fire succeeds when it represents a permanent and complete cessation of fighting. By the same token, they believe that cease-fires have failed if fighting resumes. Cynics begin to see cease-fires as jokes from the start, while the naive fall into a cycle of optimism and despair. Either way, the implication is that cease-fires agreed and then violated are ultimately unsuccessful or without value.
Yet these Middle East cease-fires were and are important, especially in Israel, where institutional and partisan politics make escalation the dominant mechanism in almost all military crises. Despite how quickly they fall apart, or at least how often they are violated, they create space for diplomatic and humanitarian engagement. At minimum, they allow new aid to reach needy people and for civilians in besieged areas to evacuate to a safer place. More significantly, they also clear the air for negotiations to begin or progress to a new stage.
Cease-fires, even if they fail to fully or durably stop the fighting, can still accomplish four intermediate and important objectives. First, they offer a temporary reprieve to civilians caught in the zone of combat. Second, they allow for parties to the conflict to rearm and engage in tactical reflection and learning. Third, they can establish new bargaining baselines that, over multiple iterations, can become a ladder to a more permanent peace agreement. And fourth, they provide narrative cover to leaders who want to rhetorically obscure their past failures and thus evade the personal and partisan costs of being held responsible or the coalition costs of winding down a war that some coalition partners are interested in preserving.
The many cease-fires of the past three years demonstrate this. Consider the initial cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, in the final week of November 2023, which saw more than 100 Hamas-held civilian hostages released, roughly 240 detained Palestinians released, and the opportunity for displaced Gazans to return to their homes, at least for a short time. The Israeli military relieved its forces while Hamas reorganized. The European and regional states whose governments urged the temporary halt expressed satisfaction—and the self-evidently vain hope that both sides would extend the cease-fire.
Both sides resumed fighting within hours, or even minutes, according to some, of the cease-fire coming into effect, but these violations were nevertheless isolated and sporadic enough to preserve the overall structure of the agreement—a dynamic often missed by foreign observers who construe any exchange of fire during an agreed pause as a grave contravention.
The longer and more significant cease-fire of Jan, 19-March 17, 2025, was similarly important. Despite likely cease-fire violations by Israel within days, and by Hamas within a week or two, the eight weeks of cease-fire permitted a significant return of tens of thousands of displaced Gazans, humanitarian aid deliveries, and major military reorganizations by both sides. It also allowed international figures such as U.S. President Joe Biden or European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to claim progress while letting up the pressure on the embattled Netanyahu government. That the promised second phase of the cease-fire never stood a chance surprised nobody.
These cease-fires were always more tenuous and imperfect than many international observers would normally expect—or the word cease-fire would suggest. We’ve pointed out that they were still valuable and still accomplished something, but it’s worth a more focused discussion of why they even happened in the first place if none of the warring parties were truly committed to anything beyond a brief pause.
Mainly these happened because international parties—from allies such as Canada to adversaries such as Turkey—placed considerable pressure on the parties, and especially on Israel. Israel faced enormous international pressure to halt effective, devastating military operations that dealt considerable damage to its adversaries while causing widespread harm to civilians.
Agreeing to cease-fires permitted Netanyahu and his government to maintain increasingly strained diplomatic ties with regional and Western allies. It also supplied a convenient excuse for pausing or stopping campaigns that enjoyed domestic support in Israel, at least on the part of coalition voters, but were not yielding strategic benefits in line with their significant costs.
Meanwhile, Israel’s adversaries understandably took advantage of the opportunity to appear reasonable, open to bargaining, and interested in peace, when in truth taking a beating on the battlefield. In some cases, like that of Hamas leading into the October 2025 cease-fire, those adversaries were being pressured by their own patrons to accept the offer.
Limited benefits are better than none. Almost everyone involved in these cease-fires were happy to engage in their pageantry with the full knowledge that whatever could be gained was tactical, tenuous, and temporary. They still saved lives; saw hostages and prisoners released; and alleviated a portion of the misery and suffering faced, and still faced, by large populations of civilians in Gaza, in the south of Lebanon, and throughout Israel (especially the north).
But there are downsides, too. Cease-fires compelled by international stakeholders who are not parties to the actual conflict are necessarily weak and, for their parties, begrudging. Carl von Clausewitz famously said that war continues so long as the will to fight remains; at no point has any party to the rounds of war between Israel and its enemies shown much desire to stop for good. The risk is that diplomacy starts to look false and pointless, and agreements unreliable with affected parties seeking to find loopholes and needing constant monitoring and enforcement.
Put differently, late Israeli politician Abba Eban’s notorious castigation that Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace now looks to be equally true of Israel’s government. Israel no longer treats ceasefires as opportunities to create more durable diplomatic arrangements, and thus whatever openings they create close without diplomatic successes. In our view a general loss of trust in negotiated settlements of any type is a harm that significantly outweighs the limited benefits of limited cease-fires, however real those benefits may be.
This takes us back to the United States and Iran, on the one hand, and Israel and Lebanon, on the other. Both the United States and Iran have a clear interest in reaching an enduring halt to the war, as both regimes have much to lose by continuing. Washington, having started a war it cannot win, is anxious to finish without an even more costly and clear defeat, but it is stuck with a situation that is untenable beyond the very short term. Iran, having survived a war that it couldn’t afford to lose, is facing a domestic economic and political crisis that it now needs to resolve. Trump’s mercurial social media posting aside, there is some reason to expect that the U.S.-Iran cease-fire could support a negotiated peace.
Israel, however, is being pressured into a cease-fire that it fears offers only tactical benefits when its campaign has not yet achieved its strategic goals. Hezbollah is still a serious threat to Israel’s security, even as Israel enjoys continued battlefield success. Much like its patron Iran, Hezbollah merely needs to outlast Israel’s offensive in order to rebuild, rearm, and return to posing a major threat to Israeli security—and to its status the most powerful actor in Lebanese foreign affairs.
Yet with Netanyahu facing an election and an uncertain political future, and with an unprecedented direct negotiation structure now established between Israel and Lebanon, the third and fourth goals of cease-fires are especially important: bargaining scaffolding and reputation laundering. The initiative that this supports is potentially historic. With Hezbollah historically weakened, the Lebanese government may finally be in a position to assert its sovereignty over the country’s south with the aid of its Western allies.
For the state of Lebanon to end the threat that Hezbollah poses to Israel and Lebanese self-determination, it would need significant support from international partners, including for its military and police. If Israel has the courage and foresight to permit this, then it may at last make lasting peace with another of its neighbors—and with Syria also amenable, this could herald a new geopolitical era for the Levant.
The lessons here matter to our broader understanding of cease-fires. They also matter to the specific question of how belligerents in this specific war can fight a way out of their unresolved security problems. And if this cease-fire collapses, then others—sometimes even lasting ones—are still possible.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.
Avishay Ben-Sasson-Gordis is a Liberalism Rekindled postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Ruderman Family Foundation Scholar in Residence and Senior Researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Simon Frankel Pratt is a lecturer in political science at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne
Commenting is a benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription.
Already a subscriber? Log In.
Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now.
Please follow our comment guidelines, stay on topic, and be civil, courteous, and respectful of others’ beliefs.
I agree to abide by FP’s comment guidelines. (Required)
The default username below has been generated using the first name and last initial on your FP subscriber account. Usernames may be updated at any time and must not contain inappropriate or offensive language.
I agree to abide by FP’s comment guidelines. (Required)
Trouble is brewing as norms against war dissolve.