(CNN) — Last week, President Donald Trump declared that the “ceasefire” with Iran was “OVER,” as US forces carried out consecutive nights of strikes against Iran.
Trump had originally announced the ceasefire in early April, just hours after threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” After announcing it would last for two weeks, he went on to extend it. But in the weeks that followed, and even after the US and Iran signed a “memorandum of understanding” that kicked off a 60-day period of negotiations to end the war, the firing did not cease. As the US and Iran continued to exchange back-and-forth attacks, Trump insisted the ceasefire remained in effect — until he decided last week that whatever thread was holding the ceasefire together had finally snapped.
This much is clear: A “ceasefire,” at least lately, doesn’t necessarily constitute a ceasing of fire. Fighting between Israel and Iran’s ally Hezbollah continued in Lebanon despite US-brokered ceasefires between the Israeli and Lebanese governments, with the Norwegian Refugee Council reporting that nearly 600 people were killed in Lebanon in the weeks following the April ceasefire. And since Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan, endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, went into effect in October, Israel has continued to attack the territory almost daily, saying it is targeting Hamas: A tally by the Government Media Office in Gaza indicates that Israel has violated the ceasefire at least 3,689 times.
What, then, is a “ceasefire”? Though the concept is as old as war itself, the term was first recorded in the mid-19th century, appearing in a Scottish newspaper as a two-word military command to cease active hostilities. During the 20th century, it evolved into a one-word noun denoting a temporary suspension of hostilities — a condition of neither peace nor outright war.
When used by political leaders, as well as journalists reporting on their remarks, the word “ceasefire” suggests that the violence in a conflict has stopped, says Rachel Nelson, an analyst at the Middle East Policy Council. But she says that often doesn’t reflect what the combatants are still doing. “Really the question is whether these parties are actually honoring what they agreed to,” she adds.
Despite how straightforward it sounds, a “ceasefire” can encompass a range of conditions. The United Nations notes that there is no single, universally accepted definition of the term, leaving parties in armed conflicts to determine what it entails for their particular situations. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy indicates that a ceasefire can be confined to a particular area where fighting has erupted or it can cover the entirety of the conflict region, though it notes that “it is usually implicit in such agreements that the cessation of firing is accompanied by no forward movement of positions or armament.”
This month also marks the 73rd anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, which established a ceasefire between the militaries of the two Koreas and their respective allies until a final peace agreement between North and South Korea could be achieved. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, the ceasefire remains in place — even as both sides have exchanged cross-border gunfire over the years, and as a formal peace treaty remains elusive.
But without a strict definition in place, nations and political leaders have taken liberties with the term. Trump, when asked to define a ceasefire in a June 3 White House briefing, suggested that the word meant something different in the Middle East: “I’d say in that part of the world, a ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.”
At least in terms of capturing the situation on the ground, Trump’s definition was accurate, says Mona Yacoubian, director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The exchange of hostilities that continued after the ceasefire was announced were indeed less intense than in the first few weeks of the war. “But it begs the question of how is that a ceasefire?” she adds.
A “ceasefire,” foreign policy experts say, is only as good as the fine print. “‘Ceasefire’ is a broad term, so it’s important to be clear on what was agreed,” Matt Waxman, adjunct senior fellow for law and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in an email. “For example, is the agreement short-term or long-term, and exactly what ‘fire’ the parties agree to ‘cease.’”
The “ceasefire” set in motion by the June agreement between the US and Iran was plagued by a lack of precision. One sticking point in the agreement revolved around what it meant to open the Strait of Hormuz. The US understood the agreement to mean that Iran would provide unimpeded access through the strait. When the Iranians opened only one channel, and attacked vessels traveling through other routes it described as unauthorized, the US claimed Iran reneged on the agreement, while Iran claimed the same of the US.
There was a certain amount of skepticism baked into the ceasefire to begin with. News reports, at varying points in the conflict, characterized it as “shaky,” “tenuous” or “unraveling,” conveying just how uncertain it was. Still, Yacoubian notes that there was utility in negotiators refraining from declaring the ceasefire dead: Even as Iran was attacking shipping traffic, and even as the US carried out military strikes, hedging kept open the possibility that negotiations could continue and possibly move toward something more closely resembling what “ceasefire” conveys.
As the word ceases to mean a ceasing of fire, new terms have been coined. When Israel continued to fire on Lebanon after a ceasefire was reached in November 2024, Yacoubian says she took to calling it a “less fire.”
For “ceasefire” to regain any semblance of meaning, Yacoubian says violations need to be called out as such. “By continuing to call something a ceasefire when it’s absolutely not a ceasefire does seem to suggest some kind of degree of complacency or acceptance of that reality, without actually trying to address the challenges,” she says. To use the word “ceasefire” to describe a situation in which there isn’t any cessation of firing only dilutes its meaning, she says, eventually rendering it meaningless.
But by Trump’s account, it seems a “ceasefire” — and the agreement governing it — was never that serious at all. “Memorandum of understanding when you’re dealing with sleazebags don’t mean much,” he said in a July 13 interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “And they don’t mean much when you’re dealing with honorable people, too.”
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