The ceasefire that halted the India-Pakistan military conflict of May 2025 has held through its first year without a renewal of the direct strikes and missile exchanges that characterised the brief but intense clash, according to a Washington Post analysis published in May and regional security assessments through June (Washington Post).
The May 10, 2025 ceasefire was agreed after a hotline communication between both countries’ Directors General of Military Operations (DGMOs), brokered with the involvement of US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The conflict had been triggered by India’s May 7 airstrikes inside Pakistan — themselves a response to a deadly militant attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir on April 22, 2025.
The absence of further major escalation is not the same as normalisation. Commercial flights between the two countries remain banned — a suspension that has now stretched beyond a year. The Indus Waters Treaty remains in abeyance. The two countries have not resumed engagement through the Permanent Indus Commission, and back-channel diplomatic contact is minimal. India’s water resources minister reiterated earlier this month that Pakistan will not receive “a single drop” of Indus water, linking the treaty’s restoration to Pakistan’s cessation of cross-border terrorism support.
A holding pattern, not a settlement
Analysts quoted in the Washington Post assessment cautioned that the ceasefire is a holding pattern rather than a settlement — the underlying grievances that produced the May 2025 conflict, including the Kashmir dispute, militant infiltration, and water-sharing, remain entirely unresolved. The India-Pakistan relationship is technically stable for now, the assessment concluded, “but you never know when the conflict could flare up, suddenly and intensely, again.”
Pakistan’s attention has meanwhile shifted toward its western border, where the conflict with Afghanistan has consumed military and political bandwidth. The absence of a second India-Pakistan confrontation in the past year has allowed Pakistan to focus resources on Operation Ghazab lil Haq, though the drone exchange with Afghanistan on July 1 underscores that Pakistan’s security environment remains under severe pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.
