Ceasefire and hostage exchange (January–March 2025)
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An agreement for a ceasefire and exchange of hostages was announced on January 15, 2025. It followed extensive negotiations throughout the war mediated primarily by Qatar and Egypt, which first resulted in a seven-day pause in fighting in November 2023 and the exchange of 110 hostages for 240 Palestinian prisoners. Negotiations continued throughout the war, including a concerted effort by U.S. Pres. Joe Biden in May 2024, a near deal in July, and a hopeful attempt in October. When the negotiations that began in October fell apart, Qatar announced a pause in its efforts to mediate until “the parties show their willingness and seriousness to end the brutal war.”
The following month Qatar resumed mediation after Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy of the incoming Trump administration, traveled to the Middle East in an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise by Donald Trump to reach a hostage release deal before his inauguration. The renewed effort, in which Secretary of State Antony Blinken of the outgoing Biden administration worked closely alongside members of Trump’s transition team, was bolstered by a desire by the warring parties and the mediators to enter a second Trump term on good footing with the incoming president. Trump’s ambiguous threat on Truth Social that “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East” without a deal by the time of his inauguration also loomed over the negotiations.
The details of the ceasefire deal followed a three-phase approach. The first phase of the deal, lasting six weeks, included
- Cessation of hostilities
- Phased release of 33 Israeli female soldiers and civilian hostages, including two dual citizens of the United States
- Phased release of about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners
- Withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas of the Gaza Strip to delineated buffer zones within the territory
- Return of displaced Gazans to their homes beginning on the seventh day
- Increase in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip to 600 trucks per day
A second phase, whose details required additional negotiation during the first phase, would see the release of the remainder of living hostages held by Hamas, the release of additional Palestinian prisoners, a wider withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip, and the declaration of a permanent end to the war. The third phase would include the exchange of bodies of deceased hostages and fighters, the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, and the opening of the Gaza Strip’s border crossings.
Implementation of the first phase
On January 19, after days of anticipation and uncertainty over the deal’s implementation, the first hostage release of the agreement took place as three Israeli women, two who had been kidnapped from their homes and the other from the music festival, were handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross. They were subsequently escorted by the IDF back into Israel, where after an initial medical inspection they were greeted by their mothers in an emotional reunion. Hours later 90 Palestinian prisoners, which included 69 women and 21 teenage boys who had been convicted of minor offenses or held without charge, were released in Ramallah in the West Bank, completing the first exchange of the agreement.
The weekly exchanges continued to take place in the subsequent weeks, including a midweek exchange arranged in the second week that remedied a dispute between Israel and Hamas during the second set of releases. But tension brewed from the start as Hamas made a spectacle of the releases, parading the hostages who were set to be freed (some of whom smiled and waved to the crowds gathered to witness) and presenting them with signed documents authenticating their release. The events were choreographed in a way that exaggerated Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip and distorted its treatment of the hostages as humane and dignified, and in propaganda it compared its treatment against that of Palestinian prisoners, some of whom were frail and emaciated upon release. That façade quickly crumbled in early February when three male hostages, who appeared pale and gaunt, were released.
Despite the pause in fighting in the Gaza Strip, violence was ramped up in the West Bank, in part as a conciliatory measure made by Netanyahu for his far-right coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich to tolerate the ceasefire agreement. Smotrich also insisted Netanyahu promise that fighting in the Gaza Strip would eventually resume. Concerns about the fate of Palestinian civilians were heightened further when Trump in late January indicated he wanted to “just clean out” the Gaza Strip and relocate its residents abroad. Days later he said that the United States would own and build on the Gaza Strip and that Gazans would not return to the territory, because “they’ll be resettled in areas where they can live a beautiful life.” But where Gazans would be welcome and secure remained entirely unclear: Egypt and Jordan had already rejected requests from Trump to take in displaced Palestinians, and Saudi Arabia condemned a suggestion by Netanyahu that Gazans be relocated to Saudi Arabia. Following Trump’s comments, UN Secretary-General António Guterres reaffirmed the UN’s commitment to a two-state solution and warned against “any form of ethnic cleansing” and the “chilling, systematic dehumanization and demonization of an entire people.”
Meanwhile, a tremendous increase in humanitarian aid flowed into the Gaza Strip, according to the United Nations, although not as quickly as promised in the ceasefire agreement. On February 10 Hamas, blaming Israeli restrictions for the delay in aid flow, announced that it intended to postpone further release of hostages. By that point, 16 Israeli hostages and more than 550 Palestinian prisoners had been released, as well as 5 Thai hostages who were not a part of the formal agreement with Israel. In response Netanyahu, with Trump’s encouragement, threatened to end the ceasefire if any of the remaining hostages were not released by February 15. Hamas later announced it would continue the hostage exchange as planned after mediators pledged to remove obstacles to the delivery of humanitarian aid. By the close of the first phase, 33 Israeli hostages and nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners had been released.
Breaking of the ceasefire
Although the original ceasefire agreement called for negotiations over the second phase to begin by the 16th day of the first phase (February 3), negotiations had still not taken place by the time the first phase ended on March 2. An informal truce remained in place through mid-March, even as Israel, which demanded the immediate release of hostages who were set to be returned under the ceasefire’s second phase, renewed its blockade of humanitarian aid and cut off electricity to the territory. Netanyahu, facing pressure within his coalition to resume the war, sought to avoid a confrontation with his political allies ahead of a looming deadline for a national budget at the end of March. With backing from the United States, he allowed the fighting to resume.
Return to hostilities (March 2025)
Israel renewed its campaign on March 18 with a fresh bombardment of the Gaza Strip, killing more than 400 people. The next day it launched an operation to bisect the Gaza Strip by retaking the Netzarim Corridor, a line of Israeli military assets just south of Gaza City that Israeli forces had removed as part of the ceasefire agreement. The creation weeks later of a new military corridor between Khan Younis and Rafah, called the Morag Corridor, further divided the Gaza Strip and isolated Rafah. Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of nearly all of Rafah in April in what it said was an operation to clear the city of Hamas combatants and infrastructure. In early May Netanyahu’s war cabinet announced a plan, set to begin in late May, to vastly expand Israeli operations and move the entirety of the population southward toward Rafah. The plan controversially included the distribution of aid at a limited number of sites in southern Gaza by the newly created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private organization set up to centralize aid-distribution efforts under the supervision of the United States and Israel. By that time the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) projected that more than half of the Gaza Strip’s population was facing emergency food insecurity and another one-fifth of the population was already facing catastrophe or famine.
Meanwhile, the United States began engaging in direct talks with Hamas, particularly over the release of the last remaining hostage with American citizenship, Edan Alexander. The move, which was the first time direct talks between the United States and the U.S.-designated terrorist group had taken place in an official capacity, prompted concerns from Israeli officials that the Trump administration was not fully committed to backing Israel in the conflict. That the United States was pursuing its own priorities in the Middle East became apparent when it announced a ceasefire with the Houthi movement on May 6, just two days after a Houthi missile struck the international airport near Tel Aviv. Israeli officials were reportedly blindsided by the announcement of the deal, which did not require Houthi forces to end hostilities with Israel. On May 12, the eve of Trump’s first trip to the Middle East in his second presidential term, Hamas released Alexander as a gesture that Trump hailed on Truth Social as a “step taken in good faith” toward ending the war. Notably absent from Trump’s itinerary was a visit with any Israeli officials.
At the end of May 2025 a ceasefire agreement, mediated by Witkoff and with added guarantees toward the pursuit of a permanent end to the war, appeared imminent. The plan, which included the release of 10 living hostages and 18 deceased hostages, would require negotiations for a permanent ceasefire to begin on the first day and throw the weight of Trump’s public promise behind the negotiations. Israeli officials agreed to the plan, but Hamas leaders rejected it, saying they did not consider its guarantees toward a permanent truce sufficiently credible and that its protocols for humanitarian aid were inadequate.
Conflict outside the Gaza Strip: West Bank, Hezbollah, Houthi forces, and Iran
The fighting was by and large centered on the Gaza Strip for the first nine months of the war, but it was never confined to that territory. In October 2023 the IDF intensified its raids in the West Bank, blockading several urban areas, and conducted a strike by warplane in the territory for the first time since the second intifada (2000–05). Raids were carried out nearly daily and concentrated primarily around refugee camps in the northern West Bank. Attacks on Palestinians by vigilante Israeli settlers increased as the number of gun permits and weaponry in the settlements proliferated, especially at the initiative of Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Skirmishes with Hezbollah near the Lebanese border threatened to open a second major front, although both the IDF and Hezbollah appeared hesitant to escalate the fighting for much of the first year of the war. Attempts by Houthi forces to strike southern Israel—an unusual target for the Yemen-based movement—using both missiles and drones also gave early indication that there was some level of coordination among the Iran-led Axis of Resistance during the war. In April 2024 Israel and Iran exchanged direct strikes, and in July the conflict took an increasingly regional turn. In September Israel shifted its attention from the Gaza Strip to Lebanon.
Israel and Iran exchange direct strikes in April 2024
Israel and Iran entered into direct confrontation in April 2024. Israeli warplanes struck Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, killing, among others, senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, which provides aid, support, and training for the Iran-led axis. Two weeks later, in a retaliation that Politico Magazine and other observers considered to be “designed to fail” in order to avoid escalation, Iran fired into Israel hundreds of drones and missiles, most of which were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow 3 antimissile systems (along with help from American, British, and Jordanian forces). Israel retaliated days later with an attack near a military complex in the Iranian city of Isfahan, which includes facilities involved in its nuclear program; Iran downplayed the incident and claimed it had intercepted the strikes. See the section below for the confrontations between Israel and Iran that took place in July and October.
Escalation with Iran’s Axis of Resistance in July 2024 and afterward
Despite reports in July that Israel and Hamas had been close to a ceasefire, the conflict was beginning to take on more regional dimensions. Israel made several decapitating strikes, damaging a critical Houthi-controlled port, killing a top Hezbollah commander, and—most boldly—assassinating Hamas’s diplomatic chief in Iran just hours after he had attended a presidential inauguration there. In September Israeli forces began to focus on confronting Hezbollah in Lebanon and killed its leader, compelling Iran to launch a barrage of missiles into Israel. On November 26 a ceasefire agreement was announced to end the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, making Lebanon the first front of the war to reach such a deal.
Israel and the Houthi movement in Yemen
On July 19 a Houthi drone struck Tel Aviv, killing one person and wounding several others after it traveled undetected for 16 hours from Yemen. The following day the IDF retaliated with an air strike on Hodeidah, a Houthi-controlled port that is critical to the import of both weaponry and humanitarian aid to the war-torn country. In September Houthi forces fired a number of missiles toward Israel in separate instances. They were intercepted, and on September 29 the IDF again retaliated, with air strikes on Hodeidah and Ras Issa, a Houthi-controlled port north of Hodeidah. Threats in March 2025 to attack Israeli ships were met by air and naval strikes from the United States, which embarked on a two-month bombardment of Houthi-controlled areas that ultimately cost the United States thousands of bombs and missiles, seven drones, and two fighter jets, without effecting an end to its militant activity. On May 4 a Houthi missile struck Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv; Israel responded in kind with a strike on the airport in Sanaa, Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital. Two days later the United States announced a ceasefire that included Houthi guarantees that U.S. ships would not be attacked, but the arrangement did not include any guarantees for Israel’s security.
Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon
On July 27 a rocket that was launched from Lebanon killed 12 children of the Druze community in the northern Golan Heights region, where much of the tension between Israel and Hezbollah had been centered since 2022. Hezbollah denied responsibility, but on July 30 the IDF responded with an air strike in Beirut that killed Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander who had been involved in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings. As Israel caught wind in late August of a missile buildup in preparation for a retaliatory salvo, the IDF preemptively struck dozens of sites in Lebanon on August 25. Hezbollah then sent hundreds of rockets and drones into Israel. Despite the major escalation, fighting between Israel and Hezbollah returned to more regular levels the next day.
In September Israel began placing greater focus on the conflict with Hezbollah. Late that month thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies, many belonging to members of Hezbollah, exploded, dealing a significant blow to its communications network. The attacks were followed days later by a campaign of intense air strikes throughout Beirut and southern Lebanon, killing hundreds of people, including civilians. On September 25 Hezbollah fired a missile toward central Israel for the first time, aiming for Tel Aviv, although it was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system. On September 27 the Israeli air force dropped more than 80 bombs on a neighborhood just south of Beirut in a strike targeting and killing Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli ground forces invaded southern Lebanon days later, on October 1. The fighting in Lebanon was far more devastating than that of the 2006 Lebanon War: by late November about 3,800 Lebanese civilians and Hezbollah combatants had been killed, one-fifth of the population of Lebanon had been displaced, and one-fourth of the buildings in southern Lebanon had been destroyed or damaged. More than half a million people fled to Syria; most were Syrians who had fled Syria for Lebanon because of the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011. On November 26 a ceasefire deal, brokered by the United States and France, was announced. It largely revolved around enforcing UN Resolution 1701 (2006), which had brought an end to the war in 2006 but whose provisions were never fully enforced.
In a show of commitment to satisfy the provisions of the ceasefire agreement, Lebanon’s parliament convened in January 2025 to appoint Joseph Aoun, the commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), as president. His inaugural speech promised that the state would bring militas’ possession of arms under state control, a statement understood to mean reining in Hezbollah as the LAF moved to assert control of southern Lebanon. Although the ceasefire agreement required Israeli forces to withdraw completely from southern Lebanon by the end of January, they remained stationed at several posts. Hezbollah, which was required by the ceasefire agreement to give up its weapons, refused to discuss its disarmament while Israel remained in Lebanon. In late March Israel resumed launching air strikes in Lebanon.
Israel and Iran
On July 31 Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief abroad who was leading Hamas’s delegation in the ceasefire negotiations, was killed by a covert Israeli operation. The assassination took place in Iran’s capital, Tehran, where Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iranian Pres. Masoud Pezeshkian the day before. According to The New York Times, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ordered a direct attack on Israel in retaliation. Iranian officials initially indicated a delay to avoid disrupting a potential breakthrough in ceasefire talks, but, after the shock of Haniyeh’s assassination had worn off, the risk of regional escalation appeared to deter Iran from responding within a timely manner.
After the September 27 assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who played a vital role in coordinating activity within Iran’s Axis of Resistance, Iran launched about 180 ballistic missiles toward central and southern Israel that it said targeted air bases and intelligence headquarters. With assistance from U.S. forces, Israel and its Arrow 3 antimissile system prevented casualties within Israel proper, although a shooting spree in Tel Aviv’s Jaffa district by Palestinian militants just before the missile barrage killed eight people. Israel launched a response nearly a month later, targeting several military sites, including facilities used in missile production, although Iranian authorities played down the attack.
In 2025, with Iran weakened significantly by the decapitation of Hezbollah in September–November 2024 and the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, many Israeli officials sought to implement a more sophisticated attack plan against Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities. After Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency in January, he pressured Israel for several months to refrain from any strikes so that he could pursue a new nuclear deal with Iran. But after negotiations faltered in June and Iran sought to ramp up its uranium enrichment, Israel launched an attack in the early hours of June 13.
Israel’s large-scale offensive in the West Bank launched in August 2024
On August 28, 2024, days after Hamas and the PIJ claimed responsibility for an attempted suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Israel launched a large-scale offensive in the West Bank that it said would prevent further terrorist attacks that might originate from the territory. At the start of the offensive the IDF blockaded roads around Jenin, Tulkarm, and Al-Faraa refugee camp as ground forces and aerial vehicles entered them, destroying roads that Israeli forces suspected of containing explosive devices and controlling access to hospitals where they said militants might hide. The offensive included air strikes in the northern West Bank and raids across the territory, which were exacerbated by ongoing violence from Israeli settlers who generally acted with impunity under the policies of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security. The killing of Ayşenur Eygi, a Turkish-American activist who was protesting settler violence near the city of Nablus, on September 6 drew international attention to concerns over IDF conduct in the offensive.
Israel’s incursion into the West Bank was expanded in February 2025 even as a ceasefire temporarily took hold in the Gaza Strip. Focused particularly on the border towns of Jenin and Tulkarm, the IDF deployed tanks into the West Bank for the first time in decades and expelled residents of the three refugee camps located in the two towns.