Ongoing Hostilities Between Cambodia and Thailand

Recent hostilities between Cambodia and Thailand have involved sustained military clashes along their disputed land border, including:

• Artillery, drone and fighter-jet strikes by both sides on border areas, with Thailand conducting repeated airstrikes into Cambodian territory.
• A major Thai air operation on Dec. 26, 2025, in which F‑16 jets dropped around 40 bombs on a village in Cambodia’s Banteay Meanchey province, destroying homes and infrastructure.
• Earlier strikes on civilian areas and facilities such as a casino complex in the Poipet/Poiet border area, and fighting around villages and cultural sites linked to the long‑running Preah Vihear border dispute. Both governments frame their actions as self‑defense and accuse the other of breaching ceasefires and planting landmines along the frontier.

The latest round of hostilities began on December 7, 2025, and continued for about three weeks until a ceasefire took effect at noon on December 27, 2025. Fighting has occurred along multiple sections of the Cambodia–Thailand border, particularly:

• Northwestern Cambodia (Banteay Meanchey province) opposite Thailand’s Sa Kaeo province, where Thai F‑16s bombed a Cambodian village.
• Areas near the Poipet/Poiet border crossing and other frontier villages and cultural sites tied to the historic Preah Vihear temple dispute.
• Border checkpoints between Cambodia’s Pailin province and Thailand’s Chanthaburi province, where military delegations also met for ceasefire talks while clashes continued in surrounding areas.

Yes. By the time the Dec. 27, 2025 ceasefire was signed, official and media tallies reported roughly 100+ people killed and very large displacement:

• Thailand: at least 24–26 soldiers and 1 civilian killed in combat, plus about 44 civilian deaths from collateral effects.
• Cambodia: at least 30–31 civilians killed and around 90 civilians injured; independent reports indicate dozens of Cambodian soldiers likely killed, though Phnom Penh has not released an official military toll.
• Displacement: roughly 700,000–1,000,000+ people forced from their homes in border areas on both sides during the December fighting, on top of earlier displacements from clashes since mid‑2025. The UN human rights chief also reported earlier waves of hostilities that killed dozens and displaced hundreds of thousands before this latest escalation.

Both governments have issued multiple official statements and are clearly treating this as an armed conflict, though neither has formally declared war:

• Cambodia’s Defense Ministry publicly accused Thailand of airstrikes on Cambodian territory (including the Dec. 26 bombing and earlier strikes on a Poipet casino complex), condemned civilian damage, and participated in signing a Dec. 27 joint ceasefire declaration.
• Thailand’s military publicly confirmed conducting joint army–air force operations, including the F‑16 bombing in Banteay Meanchey, and framed them as necessary to defend Thai territory; Thai leaders have threatened expanded full‑scale military operations if Cambodia is not sincere about a ceasefire.
• On December 27, the Cambodian and Thai defense ministers signed a formal joint statement/ceasefire agreement committing both armed forces to an immediate halt to hostilities, no new troop deployments, adherence to de‑mining obligations, and cooperation against cross‑border crime. These official communiqués and the structured ceasefire terms amount to explicit recognition of ongoing military action by both states.

Because the specific Dec. 21, 2025 State Department press release is currently unreachable, its exact wording is unknown, but available reporting and related U.S. readouts show that:

• U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke by phone with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet around Dec. 25, 2025, expressing concern about the violence and stating that Washington was prepared to help facilitate discussions to restore peace and stability between Cambodia and Thailand.
• U.S. statements, as reported in major media, stress support for a ceasefire, protection of civilians, and backing for ASEAN diplomatic efforts to mediate the border conflict.
• There is no public indication of U.S. military intervention; the response appears limited to diplomacy, calls for de‑escalation and ceasefire compliance, and coordination with regional actors.

Open‑source reporting on this specific flare‑up focuses on military operations, casualties and diplomacy; detailed, country‑by‑country lists of border closures or travel restrictions are sparse. What is known is that:

• Fighting and airstrikes have repeatedly hit border crossings and nearby towns (such as the Poipet area), prompting authorities to evacuate civilians from frontline zones on both sides and effectively restricting movement in some border districts.
• News coverage and UN statements describe hundreds of thousands to over a million people displaced from border areas, and local evacuations from villages in Banteay Meanchey (Cambodia) and adjacent Thai provinces; this implies significant disruption to cross‑border travel and trade.
• As of the latest reports, there is no widely cited, formal, long‑term closure of the entire Cambodia–Thailand border, but specific crossings and surrounding areas have been periodically closed or rendered unsafe because of active hostilities and evacuations. Current, detailed travel‑advisory language from individual governments (e.g., U.S., EU states) is not accessible in the sources reviewed.

On the State Department website, the message Exception: forbidden indicates a technical or access‑control error on the server side: the page exists in the system, but the server is refusing to display it (for example, due to misconfigured permissions, regional filters, or an internal publishing problem). It is not a user error. To obtain the full press release despite this:

• Try accessing the canonical URL instead of the internal preview link (for this item: the office-of-the-spokesperson release URL), or wait and retry in case the technical issue is temporary. In this case, however, both the main English URL and the official Chinese translation currently return the same error.
• Where direct access fails, the substance of the release can sometimes be inferred from parallel materials (e.g., foreign‑language versions, UN or media summaries, or later U.S. readouts of related calls). Here, those secondary sources confirm the topic (concern about Cambodia–Thailand hostilities and support for an ASEAN‑backed ceasefire), but the exact text of the Dec. 21 statement remains unavailable until State.gov fixes the error or republishes it. There is no alternative official repository publicly hosting the full text at this time.