2025 in review: Year of the Gaza genocide and many wars (and conflicts)

US President Donald Trump has famously claimed – and reiterated multiple times throughout the year – that he “ended eight wars” and “saved millions of lives” around the world.

The world, on its part, has learned to take these claims with a pinch of salt, for there are reasons for the cynicism.

In Gaza, Israel continues to kill Palestinians with impunity despite a ceasefire coming into effect on October 10. 

The war in Ukraine – which Trump vowed to end within 24 hours of beginning his second term in January – continues unabated.

The Thailand-Cambodia conflict has flared up once again after a brief pause. And the civil war in Sudan has sparked the largest internal civilian displacement in history, with millions caught in the crossfire between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The year also saw an escalatory curve in the civil war in Myanmar, while gang violence and armed conflict in Haiti led to an unprecedented displacement level of 1.4 million people. 

And while Israel and Iran have stopped fighting and the India-Pakistan flare-up ended in four days, peace between these nations remains fragile. 

With an unprecedented number of people killed in wars and conflicts during the year, writer and expert on geopolitical conflicts Dan Steinbock summed up 2025 as “exceedingly dark — in terms of unwarranted human and economic costs” and that the human casualties “could have been avoided with appropriate international diplomacy”.

“In the past, there was an assumption that genocides would no longer happen. The fact that such an atrocity could take place in Gaza for two years, night and day…that is likely to herald something much worse in the future,” Steinbock tells TRT World.

Steinbock’s grim prediction of “the proliferation of ever new genocides” and perhaps new wars carries weight as fresh faultlines emerge around the world and Trump, the self-proclaimed peacemaker, sends battleships to the Caribbean in the gravest escalation against Venezuela. 

As 2025 winds down, TRT World presents an analysis of the biggest conflicts that blighted the year and, perhaps, also set the tone for the new year.

‘Deadliest year’ for Gaza

The unveiling of a 20-point peace plan, followed by the start of a ceasefire on October 10 – backed by the UN and major regional powers like Turkiye – had raised hopes of an end to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and other Palestinian territories. 

But the Zionist regime merely changed the rules of engagement, continuing to target civilians in the devastated enclave and killing nearly 400 people since the truce.

The recent deaths have taken the overall toll in Gaza to more than 70,000 since the start of Israel’s war in October 2023. 

More than 30,000 of those deaths were reported in 2025 alone, according to a conglomeration of Israeli human rights groups. 

“In 2023 and 2024, grave violations were documented in Gaza, but the outcomes in 2025 reveal a sharp deterioration, with the death toll nearly doubling, displacement becoming almost across the entire enclave, and hunger becoming a cause of mass death,” a report by 12 rights groups said. 

The report described 2025 as “the deadliest and most destructive for Palestinians since 1967”, the year of the Six-Day War, which led to Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

As a big question mark hangs over the ceasefire, there are indications that the death toll in the besieged enclave could be as high as 100,000 – signifying the high human cost of Israel’s genocidal actions.  

Analysts and experts, however, also point out the resilience of the Palestinian people, which ostensibly played a critical role in forcing the Netanyahu government to accept the ceasefire. 

The Gaza ceasefire was this year’s most important global event, says Fatemeh Karimkhan, a Tehran-based Iranian journalist. 

Despite all Israeli efforts and US backing, Tel Aviv has not “succeeded in clearing” Gaza and has been forced to accept a ceasefire, which shows that the Zionist “war machine" is not the only player on the field, Karimkhan tells TRT World. 

Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian author and analyst, sees “a significant paradigm shift”, with many countries distancing themselves from the Netanyahu government over its conduct.

“The power of the Palestinians and the global solidarity they inspire are far greater than all pro-Israel Western propaganda combined,” Baroud tells TRT World.  

“In Gaza, Israel has learned a critical lesson: its immense military power, even with total Western support, can no longer guarantee political outcomes.” 

Stalemate in Ukraine 

What started as a “special military operation” in February 2022 is now approaching its third year, shows no signs of ending, and has evolved into a grinding war of attrition – the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. 

And despite Trump’s push and rush to end the war – which included a public berating of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House – 2025 has, in fact, left both Moscow and Kiev with bloody noses in the battlefield fisticuffs. 

According to estimates by an independent conflict monitoring group, around 78,000 people have been killed on both sides, including soldiers and civilians, this year, the highest death toll among all global conflicts.

Linas Kojala, CEO of the Geopolitics and Security Studies Centre in Vilnius, views the February Zelenskyy-Trump meeting as “the most destabilising moment” of the war, with ramifications for NATO.

“That episode raised serious concerns about Western unity and US commitment” to Ukraine, Kojala tells TRT World. 

After the Trump administration suspended financial assistance to Ukraine, collective aid by allies declined to around EUR 32.5 billion in 2025. In the 2022-2024 period, yearly US-led Western aid to Ukraine averaged roughly EUR 41.6 billion. 

For Ukraine, as well as Europe, Trump’s assertion that Kiev cede territory to Moscow to end the war could set a dangerous precedent, not only for the continent but the world as a whole. 

In August, many European leaders were left aghast by Trump’s red carpet welcome to the Russian leader for a summit in Alaska. 

For most of the year, ‘peace’ flew like a ping pong ball between the US, Russia, Ukraine and European nations trying to squeeze Putin into a corner - as Washington circulated and recirculated its peace proposals between the Ukrainian, Russian and European capitals. 

Trump blew hot and cold at both Putin and Zelenskyy. And most recently, he came out with a 28-point peace plan, to which Europe responded with a counter-proposal, which it believes will ensure some sort of security guarantees for Ukraine. 

Under persistent US pressure, Zelenskyy has shown more willingness to seek the parameters of a possible future settlement with Russia. 

Kojala, however, feels that “Ukraine will not capitulate, because Russia’s demands remain maximalist and fundamentally unreasonable”. 

But the longer the war continues, the more it will test US-Europe ties, according to the expert. 

“The core question is whether the US increasingly views Europe primarily as a continent of allies or as a set of competitors or even adversaries,” Kojala adds.

“That distinction matters greatly, because it would fundamentally alter the nature of the transatlantic relationship that has existed since the end of WWII.” 

The 12-day war

Israel triggered one of the most dramatic escalations of 2025, targeting Iranian cities and its nuclear facilities, and drawing the US directly into the conflict that also saw Tehran overwhelm the Zionist state with missile barrages.

The 12-day war broke “decades of strategic ambiguity and shadow warfare between Tehran and Tel Aviv”, making it “the most consequential geopolitical event of 2025,” says Aimen Jamil, an Islamabad-based expert on Iran. 

Over the past two years, even as the Gaza genocide intensified, Israel also chipped away at and severely weakened Iran’s Axis of Resistance – from Lebanon’s Hezbollah to Yemen’s Houthis. 

While Israel targeted different places in Iran, the US joined the war through an operation codenamed ‘Midnight Hammer’, dropping ‘bunker buster’ bombs and firing Tomahawk missiles at Iran’s nuclear facilities, which Tel Aviv claims are being used to enrich uranium for building atomic bombs. 

Though it was not clear how much damage the Israeli and US strikes caused to Iran’s nuclear facilities, the 12-day war put the volatile region on a knife-edge and opened up the possibility of a wider conflict.

But the war also exposed the vulnerabilities of Israel’s much-vaunted missile defence system, the Iron Dome, according to Mohammed Eslami, a political scientist at the European University Institute.

The war reshaped regional deterrence dynamics, Eslami tells TRT World, even as it “necessitated significant involvement from great powers at an operational level”.

“The US strikes on select Iranian facilities, and Washington's central role in de-escalation underscored the war’s strategic gravity,” he adds.

The Iran-Israel tensions, which experts warn might lead to more confrontations in the near future, will potentially recalibrate Middle Eastern geopolitical alignments alongside its possible repercussions on the region’s rich energy market.

The Sudan catastrophe

In October this year, the UN declared the civil war in Sudan as the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis” – a devastating conflict that has killed more than 150,000 people, injured and maimed more than double that number and displaced an estimated 12 million people in the north African nation.

The year 2025 was undoubtedly the bloodiest since the power struggle broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese army led by General Abdel Fattah al Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, and quickly spiralled into a full-fledged conflict.

The RSF has been accused of flagrant human rights violations, especially in its 18-month siege and subsequent capture of Al Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state of Sudan.

Jihad Masmahoun, an analyst on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, says that the international community needs to act by designating not only the RSF but also other allied Sudanese factions using brute force against civilians as terrorist organisations. 

“Regional feeders of the conflict also need to stop feeding the conflict,” he tells TRT World. 

With millions in need of urgent humanitarian assistance and no signs of an end to the conflict, there are fears that the crisis will likely intensify next year and put more people in the line of fire.

When nuclear neighbours fought

2025 was also a year of tensions across Southeast Asia – from the Thai-Cambodian border skirmishes to Myanmar’s civil war and the four-day Pakistan-India flare-up, which marked “the most serious military crisis in decades” between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

Sophal Ear, associate professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, sees in all these conflicts a common pattern of reactivation of older fault lines under new political conditions. 

“Longstanding disputes are becoming more volatile because domestic politics, nationalism, and weakened regional conflict-management mechanisms are amplifying tensions,” Ear tells TRT World, drawing attention to the fact that the entire region is less insulated from global trends of polarisation, great-power competition, and declining confidence in multilateral solutions.

Among all three conflicts, Ear sees the intensification of the Thailand–Cambodia border conflict as the most consequential development of 2025, showing dangers of how quickly a “managed” dispute can escalate. 

“It is a reminder that even relatively stable regions are vulnerable when historical grievances, domestic politics, and weak enforcement mechanisms converge.”