2025: A RECKONING OF BLOOD, SILENCE AND LOST CHANCES IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN

2025 closes in the Eastern Mediterranean with no winners. Only exhausted peoples, wounded societies, and a region that continues to function as a geopolitical accelerator of conflict rather than a bridge to peace. Those seeking “balance” and “stability” on diplomatic maps should first look at the rubble, the cemeteries, the hospitals without power, and the children who grew up this year to the sound of drones.

From Gaza and southern Israel to Lebanon and Syria, from the Red Sea to Cyprus and the Aegean, the Eastern Mediterranean didn’t simply experience a year of tensions. It experienced a normalisation of violence. And this normalisation is the most disturbing political fact of 2025. The war in Gaza formed the core of this haemorrhage. Not just because of the death toll—thousands of civilians, children, women—but because it definitively shattered the illusion that the region can “manage” the Palestinian issue without a political solution. Israel, operating with a logic of absolute military dominance and with the unwavering political backing of the US, proved it can impose facts on the ground—but not peace. Hamas, meanwhile, deepened the tragedy of the Palestinians, trapping a people between occupation and fanaticism. Lebanon spent the entire year on the brink of collapse. The front with Hezbollah and Israeli strikes kept the country in permanent alert, whilst economic and political disintegration continued quietly. Syria remained the region’s “forgotten front”: a war no longer in the headlines, but in practice still killing, displacing, and generating instability. The Red Sea, with attacks on commercial vessels and its militarisation, served as a reminder that the Eastern Mediterranean is not an isolated system. It’s a hub of global flows: energy, trade, strategic power. Every spark in the region affects supply chains, economies, and international balances.

The US and Russia as players

Against this backdrop, the role of the great powers was decisive—and largely disappointing. The United States remained the dominant military force, but not a hegemonic force for peace. Its policy was characterised by selective sensitivity: absolute support for Israel, rhetorical calls for “restraint”, and a complete absence of meaningful pressure for a political solution. Washington chose, once again, to manage the crisis rather than resolve it. Russia, weakened by the war in Ukraine, maintained a presence but lost initiative. In Syria, it remains a player, but more as a manager of balances than as a force shaping developments. Moscow exploited Western contradictions but offered no alternative vision of stability. Its influence in the Eastern Mediterranean in 2025 was defensive, not creative. The European Union was, for yet another year, the great absentee. Despite the fact that the Eastern Mediterranean is its immediate neighbourhood, despite refugee flows, energy dependence, and security concerns, the EU confined itself to statements of principle. It could not—or would not—articulate a unified voice, let alone function as a geopolitical player. The lack of a common foreign policy renders it a spectator in a region burning just miles from its shores. In this environment, the region’s smaller countries—Cyprus among them—found themselves exposed. The Eastern Mediterranean was often presented as an “energy paradise”, but 2025 proved that without security and political solutions, pipelines and deposits don’t bring stability. On the contrary, they often intensify competition.

The Eastern Mediterranean as a battlefield

The critical question, then, is whether there are prospects for peace. The honest answer is that 2025 didn’t generate them. Not because people don’t want them, but because the powerful don’t pursue them. Peace requires political cost, clashes with domestic audiences, and confrontation with ideological dogmas. And these are in short supply. Yet within the darkness, there are cracks of light. The exhaustion of societies, international outrage at the humanitarian catastrophe, and the impossibility of a military “final solution”—these objectively create conditions for a political restart. Not automatically, not soon, but inevitably. The Eastern Mediterranean doesn’t need more “shop-window initiatives”. It needs a new security architecture based on international law, on respect for peoples, not spheres of influence. It also needs Europe to decide whether it will remain an economic giant and political dwarf. The reckoning of 2025 is heavy. But it’s not inevitable. The region’s history shows that even from ruins, politics can be born. The question is whether 2026 will find the Eastern Mediterranean with fewer weapons and more will. Or whether we’ll continue counting victims, baptising inertia as “realism”. Because in the end, what’s haemorrhaging isn’t just the region. It’s the very idea that peace is possible. And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous wound of all.

Record death toll in Gaza

Continuing this reckoning, it’s worth dwelling on a dimension often downplayed in geopolitical analyses: the deep social and psychological damage left behind by protracted conflict. The year 2025 didn’t just record numbers of dead and wounded; it recorded a generation growing up without horizons. In Gaza, southern Lebanon, Syria, and neighbouring countries hosting refugees, daily life is shaped by insecurity, loss, and the normalisation of violence. This erosion of the social fabric is war’s most resilient “weapon”: it remains long after the guns fall silent. At the same time, 2025 exposed in brutal fashion the double standards of the international community. International law is invoked selectively, humanitarian principles become objects of geopolitical negotiation, and human rights are transformed into tools of rhetorical confrontation rather than compasses for policy. This hypocrisy doesn’t go unnoticed by the region’s peoples. On the contrary, it feeds cynicism, strengthens extreme voices, and weakens every moderate political proposal speaking of coexistence. Also significant is the upgraded role of regional powers. Turkey, Iran, the Arab Gulf monarchies moved through 2025 with increased confidence, exploiting the gaps and contradictions of the major players. Sometimes as mediators, sometimes as instigators or financiers, they contributed to shaping a multi-layered competition where local fronts connect directly to broader strategic objectives. The Eastern Mediterranean thus transforms into a chessboard with many players, with peoples often in the position of the weakest pawns.

Within this environment, the concept of peace risks degrading into mere “absence of generalised war.” But peace without justice, without political solution, without the prospect of dignified life, is nothing but a fragile ceasefire. The year 2025 showed that military solutions don’t close chapters—they reproduce them. Every new operation, every “surgical strike,” sows the ground for the next explosion. If there’s one lesson from the departing year, it’s that the Eastern Mediterranean cannot bear another postponement of politics. Peace won’t emerge from the exhaustion of adversaries, but from societies’ exhaustion with war. The wager for the future isn’t simply whether tension hubs will diminish, but whether faith that coexistence is possible will be recovered. Without that faith, even the most carefully designed diplomatic initiative will remain an empty letter. And then the Eastern Mediterranean will continue to haemorrhage—not just from the wounds of wars, but from the absence of hope.

This article was first published on 04.01.2026

Source: 2025: A RECKONING OF BLOOD, SILENCE AND LOST CHANCES IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN