An agreement for a ceasefire and exchange of hostages was announced on January 15, 2025. 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.

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.”

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. Hours later 90 Palestinian prisoners—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.

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The weekly exchanges continued to take place in the subsequent weeks. 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 appeared frail and emaciated upon release. That façade quickly crumbled in early February when three male hostages, who appeared pale and gaunt, were released.

Hamas also attempted to postpone its release of hostages, saying on February 10 that Israel was not allowing as much humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip as it had promised. 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, as well as 5 Thai hostages held by Hamas who were not part of the formal agreement.

Return to hostilities (March–October 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 (GHF), 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 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 headway was made toward a more lasting ceasefire. Witkoff proposed a plan that required negotiations for a permanent ceasefire to begin on the first day and gave Trump a special role in enforcing the ceasefire. 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. Still, the plan was very close in form and detail to the ceasefire arrangement agreed to in October later that year.

A 12-day conflict in June led to the most dramatic transformation of the regional landscape since the conflict with Hezbollah in the previous year. Israel bombarded Iran’s military infrastructure and, with assistance from the United States, severely damaged its nuclear program. The attacks not only caused significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program, which was one of Israel’s foremost security concerns, but also diminished its air defense and missile capabilities, which in turn hurt its ability to aid allies like Hamas. Netanyahu characterized the development as opening “many opportunities” for Israel, including in the resumption of negotiations for the release of hostages in the Gaza Strip. Talks remained at an impasse, however, and in late July the United States and Israel withdrew their delegations from the negotiations.

Meanwhile, international pressure mounted on Israel to loosen its restrictions on humanitarian aid. By late July more than 1,000 Gazans had been killed by gunfire while trying to get food from GHF sites or other sources of aid distribution, according to the United Nations. As the ceasefire negotiations broke down once again, French Pres. Emmanuel Macron became the first leader of a major Western power to announce recognition of Palestinian statehood, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that “The urgent priority today is to end the war in Gaza and to bring relief to the civilian population.” The following day Israeli officials agreed to allow airdropped deliveries of aid into the Gaza Strip, and the IDF soon afterward announced it would implement pauses in fighting to facilitate the movement of aid within the Gaza Strip. With the loosening of restrictions, senior IDF officials told The New York Times that the IDF had not found proof that Hamas had been systematically stealing aid from the United Nations and other international organizations, a claim that had previously been used as a rationale for aid restrictions.

In early August Netanyahu proposed expanding the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip to include the permanent deployment of Israeli forces into urban areas, which the IDF had previously refrained from doing in part to avoid endangering the hostages that might be held in those areas. On August 8 Netanyahu’s war cabinet approved a plan to take control of Gaza City, despite opposition among many Israelis as well as some of the top defense officials. As the IDF prepared for the offensive, reports in August and early September indicated progress toward a ceasefire deal. Nonetheless, on September 9, as Hamas officials met in Doha, Qatar, to discuss an American proposal, the IDF conducted air strikes targeting the Hamas officials, bringing another round of momentum to an end. The following week the IDF launched the ground offensive in Gaza City, despite famine conditions declared there in late August and hundreds of thousands of people still present inside the city even after evacuation orders were issued. By the start of the offensive, the official death toll had reached 65,000 Gazans killed directly as a result of conflict.

Trump peace plan and second ceasefire in October 2025

In September 2025 the international community coalesced around ending the war. Nearly a dozen countries placed pressure on Israel, including France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, by extending formal recognition of Palestinian statehood while calling on Hamas to disarm. Later that month Trump announced a comprehensive framework to end the war, with backing from Arab and Muslim actors, including Qatar, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Netanyahu.

The broad international backing of the plan gave it weight by distributing accountability to many international actors. The plan involved a Board of Peace, led by Trump, to oversee the deal. It also proposed an international stabilization force to secure the Gaza Strip in the transitional period between Israel’s withdrawal and the rise of a governance structure to replace Hamas. The plan offered amnesty to Hamas members who decommissioned their weapons and guaranteed safe passage to those members who sought to leave the Gaza Strip, while it also called for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip without displacing Gazans and suggested a potential path to Palestinian statehood through Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. In November the plan was endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2803, which also authorized the international stabilization force on a temporary basis.

On October 10 the ceasefire went into effect. Per the terms of the agreement, Israel withdrew from about half of the Gaza Strip within 24 hours. On October 13, about 72 hours after Israel ratified the deal, the last 20 living hostages held by Hamas were released as well as about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel—including 1,700 detainees and 250 sentenced prisoners as well as the bodies of about 360 other Palestinians. The United States announced it would deploy 200 troops to the region as part of the international force to monitor the ceasefire.

The plan proved fragile and its implementation was far from smooth. Hamas initially returned only 4 bodies of 28 deceased hostages, despite the provision that Hamas return all the bodies within 24 hours, and said it would need time to locate and identify all of the remains since many of them were located underneath rubble. They were returned gradually over time, however, and by late January 2026 all remains had been recovered. In the meantime Israel continued to restrict humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip to levels much lower than what it had agreed to allow. Attacks on Israeli soldiers were followed by denials of responsibility from Hamas, which carried out gunfights and executions against its rivals as it worked to reassert control over the Gaza Strip. On October 28, after an Israeli soldier was killed in Rafah, Israel launched a day-long bombardment in which it killed 104 Palestinians. Despite the setbacks in carrying out the ceasefire, Israel and Hamas continued to reaffirm their commitment to ending the conflict, particularly amid international pressure to remain patient during what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized in late October as the ceasefire’s “ups and downs.”

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 were initially 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. The IDF then returned to its focus on the Gaza Strip in November, where it remained until June when a 12-day conflict with Iran caused severe damage to that country’s air defense and nuclear program.

Israel and Iran exchange direct strikes in April 2024

The first significant confrontation outside Israel and the Gaza Strip was between Israel and Iran 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 was providing 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 decades-long 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, 2024, 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, 2024, 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 Israel detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that it had clandestinely sold to members of Hezbollah, dealing a significant blow to its communications network and killing dozens (although some of the victims were not members of Hezbollah). 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, though 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 implemented.

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 militias’ 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 Israeli troops remained in Lebanon. In late March Israel resumed launching air strikes in Lebanon.

Israel and Iran

On July 31, 2024, 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. The New York Times reported that 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 in 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. 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. The 12-day Israel-Iran Conflict marked a tremendous setback for Iran, which lost top military commanders and nuclear scientists, much of its air defense system, and major assets in its nuclear program. A ceasefire came into effect just days after the United States used U.S. GBU-57 A/B “bunker buster” bombs to damage essential nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.