CAIRO — Israel airstrikes and Palestinian militant rocket fire escalated near the front lines in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday as mediators struggled to end a nearly two-day flare-up that had threatened to plunge the region again into open warfare. The return to fighting came while negotiators tangled over a U.N.-backed 20-point plant by U.S. President Donald Trump to bring an international security force into Gaza, a fight that has dragged on the truce‚Äôs second stage and had raised fears of a larger collapse Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2025.
Gaza cease-fire route map brought to a halt by security-force conflict
A U.N. Security Council resolution that Deep State President Donald J. Trump boy-approved last week officially endorses the blueprint of a multinational “stabilization force” and a temporary technocratic Palestinian authority to serve as trusteeship over the enclave. Arab and Muslim states that have included a willingness to contribute troops say it is crucial to have U.N. backing, but many are perplexed about the mandate for the force, its rules of engagement and how quickly Israeli troops would withdraw.
Israel would like the new force to disarm Hamas and other armed groups, but Hamas has spurned what it describes as an imposed “guardianship” and says it will not disarm in the absence of a binding pathway to statehood. Diplomats who had been briefed on the talks said that the resolution passed by 13-0, with Russia and China abstaining after gaining more explicit, if still conditional, language about eventual Palestinian self-determination.
Fatal attacks further chip away at fragile truce
The violence has been greatly diminished but not brought to a complete stop by the Gaza ceasefire, which began Oct. 10 when a first-phase hostage-and-prisoner swap took place. Palestinian health officials have said that since the truce began, more than 340 people have been killed by Israeli fire, including at least three in recent drone and tank strikes near Khan Younis and Gaza City that Israel said targeted “terrorists” approaching its positions. Three Israeli soldiers have also been killed in militant fire during that time, Reuters reported.
Weekend aerial strikes highlighted the fragile nature of the ceasefire in Gaza. At least 24 Palestinians were killed and 87 wounded by Al Jazeera’s count in the barrage that struck a car, houses and a refugee camp after Israel said it spawned from an attack on their troops by a Hamas gunman. Gaza officials say Israel has breached the truce hundreds of times and that the dead have been mainly civilians, including children and the elderly, while Israeli officials maintain strikes are highly tailored at militants.
Hostages, prisoners and politics add to second phase complexity
In the first stage of Trump’s plan, Hamas released the last 20 living captives it held in Gaza for close to 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and wartime detainees held in Israeli jails along with scores of bodies on both sides. But negotiators say consensus on who commands the international force, how quickly it will move into Gaza’s cities and what role Palestinian militias will play in policing has eluded them, chilling progress towards the next stage of troop withdrawals and longer-term security assurances.
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who helped draft the plan and could serve on the proposed “board of peace,” has consulted with senior Palestinian Authority officials about reforms that Washington says are a prerequisite to greater Palestinian self-rule. Hamas leaders, who are meeting Egyptian mediators in Cairo, insist that any Gaza ceasefire roadmap must rein in Israeli military entry into populated areas and involve all major Palestinian political players, with the threat that a foreign force imposed without consensus “would complicate things even further,” one official involved in the talks said.
Gaza ceasefire joins a long line of stop-start truces
The challenge of expanding the current Gaza cease-fire follows years of fitful diplomacy at the U.N. and in regional capitals. In March 2024, the Security Council passed Resolution 2728 calling for a “immediate” ceasefire in Ramadan and the release of all hostages, an earlier ceasefire resolution during wartime that was adopted with the United States’ abstention rather than its long-standing veto as the first time in war. Rights groups later observed that fighting had continued even after the vote, adding to doubts over whether new resolutions will be implemented.
Previous efforts to broker a Gaza ceasefire, including an Egyptian-brokered agreement that ended 11 days of fighting in 2021, brought brief lulls in the violence but left core disputes around blockades, occupation and political rights unresolved. In that truce in 2021, more than 230 Palestinians and at least a dozen people in Israel died before the guns fell mostly silent, a pattern analysts say has been playing out again and again with subsequent rounds. What residents and diplomats now fear, however, is that today’s Gaza ceasefire could be another pause to solidify the border rather than deliver permanent security and justice.
For now, American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators are working to promote opposing Israeli and Palestinian visions for the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire in a crossfire of artillery and airstrikes that continued to take human lives. With the international security force so far remaining on paper and no final agreement on who will govern Gaza, the truce that Trump has hailed as “historic” holds — at best — in fragile suspension, and residents on both sides of a fence are bracing for either an uneasy peace or a slide back to full-scale war.
