October 22, 2025 | Wednesday
Tags: donald-trump, jd-vance, marco-rubio, benjamin-netanyahu, jared-kushner, vladimir-putin
A recently announced 20-point ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has largely collapsed, with mutual accusations of violations, renewed strikes, and heavy casualties undermining hopes for a lasting pause. High-level diplomacy over the Ukraine war has faltered as planned US-Russia meetings were postponed while Washington imposed tougher sanctions and approved longer-range Ukrainian strikes inside Russia, raising escalation risks.
The ceasefire announced in recent weeks and framed as a 20 point plan has failed to produce a durable cessation of hostilities. The agreement was described publicly as an arrangement between Israel and Hamas brokered with American facilitation and international fanfare, yet the document contained only a small number of operationally implemented items and omitted binding timelines, governance arrangements, and security guarantees. Once the agreement went into effect, Israeli forces and Hamas both lodged accusations of violations. Hamas media reported that Israel had carried out 80 violations since the ceasefire went into effect, while Israeli statements cited targeted attacks against Israeli Defence Forces units as justification for retaliatory strikes. Israeli authorities reported two IDF soldiers killed in clashes in the Rafah area and said anti tank and small arms fire had been directed at troops. Palestinian medical sources and Hamas reported that Israeli strikes killed dozens on a single Sunday, with one tally noting 97 Palestinians killed and more than 230 wounded in the period cited. At the same time Israeli officials insisted all surviving hostages had been returned, while press accounts and Israeli statements noted that Israel continued to insist on recovery of bodies buried in rubble as a standing operational issue. International monitors and UN officials confirmed that vast quantities of unexploded ordnance remain in Gaza, a fact used by some independent sources to suggest at least a portion of recent IDF casualties resulted from accidents rather than renewed Hamas offensives. President Trump and senior US envoys including Senator J.D. Vance, Jared Kushner, and White House Middle East envoys traveled to Israel in the immediate aftermath to press for implementation of the limited deal and to forestall a resumption of large scale Israeli ground operations.
The implemented portion of the agreement is narrow and replicates an established pattern of ephemeral truces. Over the past two years short-term truces have followed the same script: hostage releases in exchange for prisoner transfers, short cessations of major ground offensives, constrained humanitarian windows, and then renewed military operations. Previous cycles in November 2023 and January 2025 followed this same dynamic. Those familiar mechanics matter because the 20 point framework lacks articles that bind either side to durable political outcomes. There is no agreed mechanism for Gaza’s governance after cessation, no timetable for disarmament or for an international security presence, and no written guarantees about territorial sovereignty or the status of Palestinian political institutions. The narrow operational points that were implemented are therefore prey to interpretation and to tactical contestation on the ground. Israel alleges that Hamas has not handed over all remains or complied with other technical clauses; Hamas asserts that Israeli bombardment continues despite the declared ceasefire. In practice the limited fields of agreement are collapsing into mutual accusations and operational responses.
Analysis of why the ceasefire has not held highlights structural incentives embedded in Israeli strategy and the asymmetries of force. Israeli military doctrine, as reflected in recent operations, privileges air power and intelligence driven strikes over sustained infantry occupation. The Israeli air force and intelligence services retain pronounced advantages in stand off precision fires and covert operations. Israel’s ground forces, by contrast, are composed largely of mobilized reservists with variable training and morale. Urban counterinsurgency inside Gaza, characterized by tunnel networks and dense population, amplifies the logistical and casualty costs of a protracted infantry campaign. The operational result is a calculated preference for attrition by bombardment punctuated by limited ground incursions. A temporary cessation of major ground operations therefore gives Israel precisely what its planners seek: relief for stretched reserve forces, time to reconstitute logistical stocks, and political space to manage rising international pressure. That calculus explains repeated short truces even where political leaders prefer more definitive outcomes.
Political objectives on both sides render the arrangement unstable. Israeli political leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hardline coalition partners such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have consistently set an aim to eliminate Hamas’s operational capacity and to retain decisive control over Gaza’s borders and reconstruction processes. That intent amounts to a form of de facto annexation when control over security, cross border flows, and reconstruction is sustained by Israeli forces or proxies. Hamas’s strategic objective remains retention of armed capacity, refusal to disarm, and insistence on a path toward Palestinian statehood that includes Gaza and the West Bank. Those positions are mutually exclusive absent a clear enforcement and verification regime anchored by neutral international forces and enforceable timelines. The United States’ short term approach — senior envoys visiting to apply pressure, diplomatic assertions that the ceasefire remains in effect despite active strikes — provides limited constraint on Israel’s operational choices. Given domestic political dynamics in Israel, the tactical utility of a truce for force regroupment, and unresolved questions over hostages and rubble recovery, the current cessation is best understood as a temporary respite rather than the foundation for a stable political settlement. Expect repeated cycles of bombardment, targeted ground operations, and fragile pause until a binding, detailed, enforceable political framework is negotiated and implemented by the parties and third parties with enforcement capacity.
Planned high level diplomacy between Washington and Moscow stalled this week as senior meetings and a proposed Trump-Putin summit were postponed or canceled, while the United States simultaneously adopted a harder line through sanctions and approvals for longer range Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory. The planned meeting between Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was postponed and the proposed summit in Budapest between President Trump and President Vladimir Putin was called off, reportedly because the discussions “did not feel right” and were not producing satisfactory progress. At the same time President Trump authorized a significant sanctions package targeting Russia’s largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, and according to reporting the United States reversed earlier limits on supporting Ukrainian long range strikes inside Russia. In the operational sphere Ukraine carried out strikes on Bryansk Oblast using British and French produced Storm Shadow missiles with a range of approximately 150 miles. Western reporting noted that US intelligence sharing and targeting data are critical to Ukraine’s employment of these systems; earlier policy had restricted their use for strikes inside Russia pending US authorizations. The combination of canceled diplomacy, renewed sanctioning of Russian energy infrastructure, and the green light for extended range strikes marks a material escalation in Western policy relative to the previous period.
This policy pivot exposes a pattern of oscillation between diplomatic outreach and kinetic escalation that complicates any negotiated settlement. The United States and European allies had been discussing possible concessions around territorial lines and security guarantees as a path to ceasefire. Moscow had signaled potential flexibility on certain southern oblasts in exchange for recognition of gains elsewhere in the Donbas. Kyiv refused to trade core Donetsk territory according to public accounts, making the diplomatic window narrow. The posturing by Washington to convene high level meetings served both as a pressure tool on Moscow and as leverage to extract concessions. The sudden imposition of sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil is notable because previous administrations had avoided targeting those entities to preserve legal channels for allied oil purchases. The consequences are immediate: reduced Russian export revenues, increased pressure on global oil markets, and the potential for maritime interdiction efforts that would raise the risk of direct confrontation with Russian logistics and with third country purchasers such as India and China that have been sourcing sanctioned crude through shadow shipping. On the kinetic side authorizing Ukraine to employ and receive targeting support for long range strike systems converts Western intelligence support into an instrument that enables attacks on sovereign Russian territory, a step that raises escalation risks and complicates any diplomatic track.
European dependency on the US security umbrella frames the negotiating constraints. European capitals seek a freeze that would buy Kyiv time to rearm, train manpower, and rebuild defensive lines. Paris, Berlin and London do not appear prepared to deploy large scale expeditionary ground forces independently, and they expect American security guarantees to underpin any durable arrangement. Kyiv’s refusal to cede territory without ironclad security assurances flows from the absence of alternative mechanisms to deter renewed Russian offensives. Russia’s demand for Ukrainian neutrality and cessation of NATO accession remains a core red line. The practical problem for negotiators is to construct a credible security architecture that satisfies Russian demands for nonalignment while assuring Ukraine against future aggression. Proposals discussed publicly include economic entanglements such as Western stakes in Ukrainian energy and mineral sectors to create a practical tripwire; however these ideas remain untested and politically fraught for Western publics and legislatures.