Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review — Edition 7 | Published 3 January 2025 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2025
Quarterly Briefing
- Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed by IDF in Rafah on October 16; Gaza war continues despite his death.
- Lebanon war escalates; Hezbollah Secretary-General Nasrallah assassinated; ceasefire agreed November 27.
- Assad regime collapses December 8; Syrian rebels take Damascus after 54 years of Ba’ath rule.
- Donald Trump wins US presidential election November 5; takes office January 20 with Ukraine, canal agenda.
- Jamaica economy contracts 2.8% in September quarter; Beryl and Storm Rafael compound agricultural losses.
- Red Sea Houthi attacks exceed 190 incidents; Suez Canal traffic less than half its pre-crisis volume.
Prologue: The Quarter Everything Shifted
Few three-month periods in recent memory have produced such a compression of transformative events as the final quarter of 2024. Hamas’s military and political leader was killed. Israel opened a second front war in Lebanon that lasted seven weeks before a ceasefire, backed by France and the United States, came into effect in late November. And in the first week of December, the regime that Bashar al-Assad’s family had held over Syria for 54 years collapsed in eleven days, as a rebel coalition swept from Aleppo to Damascus with a speed that astonished even the most optimistic opposition analysts. Iran’s regional corridor to Hezbollah was severed. Russia’s most important Middle Eastern military foothold was suddenly in question. The geopolitical map of the eastern Mediterranean was redrawn in a single fortnight.
In Washington, Donald Trump won the US presidential election on November 5, giving him a second term and a mandate to pursue the foreign policy agenda he had articulated during the campaign: rapid resolution of the Ukraine war on terms comfortable to Moscow, the reassertion of American primacy over the Panama Canal, and an immigration enforcement posture with direct implications for Caribbean diaspora communities across the region. As this edition is published on January 3, 2025, Trump takes office in seventeen days. The world he inherits is more fluid, and in some respects more dangerous, than the one he left four years ago.
Gaza: A Decapitated Hamas, an Unresolved War
The killing of Yahya Sinwar on October 16 — confirmed by dental records and acknowledged by Hamas itself — was the most significant operational achievement for Israel since the war began. Sinwar, who had been the mastermind of the October 7, 2023, attack and had led Hamas’s military strategy through fifteen months of devastating urban warfare, was killed by IDF troops during a routine patrol in the Rafah area, in what Israeli officials described as a chance encounter rather than a targeted strike. He was found carrying personal identification and large amounts of cash. The manner of his death — unremarkable in its operational details, hidden for thirteen months in the tunnels he had built — was itself a commentary on the war’s character.
Sinwar’s death was expected by Israeli and Western analysts to create conditions for a ceasefire deal, on the theory that Hamas’s remaining leadership would be more willing to accept hostage-for-prisoner terms without their most hardline figure’s veto. Through November and December, ceasefire negotiations via Qatar and Egypt intensified. By the close of this reporting period, those talks are reported to be approaching a framework agreement, with the most contested issues — the fate of the remaining living male hostages, the composition of post-war Gaza administration, and the modalities of Israeli military withdrawal — not yet fully resolved. As of January 2, 2025, the Gaza war has been active for fifteen months, with no ceasefire yet signed. But the diplomatic temperature is different from any point since the conflict began.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza had reached what multiple UN agencies described as the worst point in the war’s history. Aid deliveries had been inadequate throughout the conflict, and as the final months of 2024 progressed, access conditions deteriorated further. IPC preliminary findings indicated approximately 1.84 million people — essentially the entire Gazan population — facing acute food insecurity. The Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll exceeded 44,000 by year’s end. For Jamaica and the Caribbean, whose connection to these events is primarily economic — mediated through Red Sea shipping — the war’s continuation without end continued to translate directly into elevated import costs and supply chain disruption.
Lebanon: War, Assassination and Ceasefire
While Gaza ground on, Israel escalated sharply against Hezbollah in Lebanon during this quarter. The campaign’s operational high point came before the reporting period opened: on September 27, Israel assassinated Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in a massive airstrike on the organisation’s headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs. His successor, Hashem Safieddine, was killed days later. In early October, Israel launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, fighting Hezbollah in the same border villages that had seen the 2006 war. The scope of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanese infrastructure was extensive, destroying Hezbollah’s command structure, weapons depots, and communications networks with systematic precision.
A ceasefire agreement mediated by France and the United States took effect on November 27. Under its terms, Israeli forces would begin a phased withdrawal from Lebanese territory, Hezbollah would pull its forces north of the Litani River, and the Lebanese army would deploy to the south in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1701. The deal was broadly welcomed internationally, though its durability — given Hezbollah’s history of reconstituting its capabilities in precisely these circumstances — was immediately questioned by independent analysts. As of January 3, 2025, the Lebanon ceasefire is holding, though with reported incidents of continued Israeli strikes on Hezbollah weapons caches described by Israel as necessary to prevent rearmament.
Syria: Fifty-Four Years, Eleven Days
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government on December 8 may prove to be the most consequential single geopolitical event of 2024. The Assad dynasty, founded by Hafez al-Assad’s coup in 1970 and continued by Bashar since 2000, had survived fifteen years of civil war, a US sanctions regime, and periodic international isolation. What it could not survive was the combination of a renewed rebel offensive led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham moving from Aleppo southward with Turkish support, a Hezbollah ally shattered by Israeli strikes and no longer capable of providing the ground forces that had saved Assad in 2015, and a Russia distracted and depleted by its war in Ukraine. Assad fled to Moscow on December 8 as rebel forces entered Damascus without significant resistance.
The geopolitical consequences rippled outward with immediate effect. Iran’s land corridor connecting Tehran to Hezbollah in Lebanon — which had run through Iraqi militia-controlled territory and across Syria — was severed. Russia’s naval base at Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, its only such facility outside the former Soviet Union, was in jeopardy. The new Syrian transitional authorities, whose relationship with Russia and Iran was adversarial by definition, had no obligation to honour the arrangements of the regime they had overthrown. Russia’s capacity to project power into the Mediterranean — already diminished by the redeployment of Black Sea Fleet assets following Ukraine-related losses — was further constrained.
For Jamaica and the Caribbean, Syria’s transformation was primarily a second-order development. Its most direct Caribbean implication was geopolitical: the weakening of Iran’s regional position reduced Iranian leverage over the Houthi movement, potentially affecting the strategic calculations behind the Red Sea attacks. With Hezbollah weakened in Lebanon and the Syria corridor severed, Iran’s ability to resupply and direct Houthi operations was constrained in ways that were not yet clear at year’s end. Whether this constraint would translate into a Houthi stand-down — or whether the Red Sea campaign had achieved sufficient organisational independence to continue regardless — was one of the defining uncertainties going into 2025.
The Red Sea: A Crisis in Its Second Year
The Houthi Red Sea shipping campaign entered its second full year in November 2024 with more than 190 attacks recorded since the campaign’s launch in November 2023. The scale of trade diversion remained extraordinary. The number of ships passing through the Suez Canal fell from approximately 2,068 per month in November 2023 to roughly 877 per month by October 2024 — less than half of pre-crisis volumes — as the majority of operators continued to route cargo around the Cape of Good Hope. Asia-to-Caribbean freight rates had spiked to over $8,400 per forty-foot equivalent unit at their July 2024 peak before easing back to approximately $3,500 in October — still more than four times the pre-crisis average.
For Jamaica and the Caribbean, the cumulative cost of this second year of disruption was substantial. Every import category affected by Asian and Mediterranean supply chains — from construction materials and consumer electronics to pharmaceutical packaging and processed foods — was arriving on elevated terms. The construction sector, the retail sector, and the agricultural input supply chain were all absorbing costs that had no direct domestic origin but were structural features of the global trade environment in which Caribbean islands operated. The Lebanon ceasefire in November produced no immediate Houthi response. The Gaza war’s continuation meant the campaign’s stated justification remained intact. The Houthis were attacking shipping with drones, missiles and even naval vessels, demonstrating a capability that had developed significantly over the course of the crisis.
Ukraine: The Election Result and Its Implications
Donald Trump’s election victory on November 5 transformed the strategic landscape for the Ukraine war in ways whose full implications will only emerge after his January 20 inauguration. Trump had consistently criticised the scale of US support for Ukraine during the campaign, pledged to end the war quickly without specifying terms, and expressed sympathy for a negotiated settlement that critics characterised as weighted toward Russian interests. The Biden administration’s response to Trump’s election was to accelerate the delivery of already-committed military assistance, seeking to establish a forward-positioned inventory of weapons and munitions that would be harder for a new administration to claw back.
The period also brought a development that expanded the war’s international dimension: the deployment of North Korean troops alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, confirmed by Ukrainian officials and the Pentagon. Estimates put the initial deployment at up to 10,000 soldiers, with more expected. The deployment represented the most direct military alliance between Russia and a rogue-state actor since the war began, raising concerns about the technology transfers and financial payments North Korea would receive in return. Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory, meanwhile, reached new depths: attacks on fuel storage and industrial facilities hundreds of kilometres inside Russia demonstrated a strike capacity that would not have been operationally possible without Western-supplied precision systems.
For the Caribbean, Ukraine’s war continued its third consecutive year of distorting global grain and fertiliser markets. The quarter brought no resolution and no near-term prospect of resolution. What it brought was a date — January 20, 2025 — that would at least determine whether American policy toward the war would change direction.
Venezuela and the Caribbean Fracture
Venezuela’s disputed presidential election of July 28 — in which the National Electoral Council declared Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52 per cent of the vote, while the opposition produced polling-station tallies from 84 per cent of precincts showing Edmundo González winning by a landslide — continued through this quarter as the hemisphere’s most contested political question. The Carter Center and most independent international observers described the election as failing to meet democratic standards. The United States did not recognise Maduro’s declared victory.
CARICOM’s response exposed the bloc’s internal divisions on Venezuelan democracy. Some CARICOM members with close ties to Venezuela through the Bolivarian Alliance — notably St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Dominica — congratulated Maduro. Others, including Guyana, called for transparent verification. Most took a cautious, non-committal position. Jamaica’s government did not formally endorse Maduro’s claimed victory but also refrained from leading regional criticism. The controversy poisoned CARICOM-Venezuela relations entering the new year and complicated the bloc’s ability to present a unified regional position on Caracas’s ongoing Essequibo pressure campaign against Guyana.
Jamaica’s Economy: Recovery After the Storms
Jamaica entered the final quarter of 2024 absorbing the most severe weather year in recent memory. Hurricane Beryl — which struck the island as a Category 4 system on July 3 — had caused extensive agricultural damage, disrupted the tourism sector during a peak booking period, and produced infrastructure losses that were still being repaired through the autumn. The GDP data reflected this: the economy contracted by 2.8 per cent in the quarter ending September 2024, a significant reversal from the preceding growth trend. When Tropical Storm Rafael struck in November, adding further agricultural losses to an economy still recovering from Beryl, it compounded a difficult year.
The Bank of Jamaica responded to the storm-driven inflation with a careful calibration. Headline inflation had peaked at 6.5 per cent in August — pushed above the top of the 4–6 per cent target range by Beryl-related food price surges — but eased back toward 5 per cent, the midpoint of the target band, by year’s end. The BOJ began cutting its policy rate from its 7 per cent peak in August 2024, initiating an easing cycle that reflected both easing domestic inflation and the need to support recovery. Unemployment, meanwhile, reached a historic low of 3.5 per cent in October — a remarkable labour market outcome for a quarter characterised by weather-related economic disruption and a GDP contraction.
Tourism’s recovery trajectory was reasserting itself as the winter season began. The resort parishes were reporting hotel bookings at or near pre-Beryl levels for the December–March high season, and the North American market’s appetite for Jamaica as a destination showed no lasting adverse reaction to the hurricane’s disruption. The real estate and construction sectors, while absorbing elevated material costs from the ongoing Red Sea disruption, were active. The fourth quarter of a difficult year was ending with indicators pointing toward a recovery in 2025, contingent on no repeat of the extraordinary weather events that had dominated the year.
Looking Ahead
As this edition is published on 3 January 2025, the region faces its most complex geopolitical environment in years. The Middle East has been structurally transformed: Sinwar is dead, Nasrallah is dead, Assad is gone, Hezbollah is degraded, and Iran’s regional network is the weakest it has been in decades. What this means for the Gaza war’s trajectory — and for the Houthi Red Sea campaign that costs Caribbean consumers every week — is still to be determined. In seventeen days, a new American administration takes office, with declared intentions to reshape American policy on Ukraine, Panama and immigration in ways that directly affect this region. Jamaica’s own economy has endured a difficult year and is positioned for recovery. Whether that recovery will be supported or complicated by the geopolitical events now unfolding is the defining question for 2025.
Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.
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