MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — In a stunning turn of events that has left world leaders and military strategists speechless, all conflicts in the Middle East have come to an abrupt end following a spirited albeit loosely organized student protest on the quad of Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.

The protest, led by the Students for World Peace and Consensual Hugs, has been hailed as the most effective peacekeeping operation in modern history. Political analysts are still trying to understand how a small group of college students could achieve what decades of diplomacy, economic aid, non-profit presence, nation-state backing, sanctions, and military intervention could not.

“It’s unprecedented,” said Dr. Chad Stokes, a professor of international relations and sociological anthropological mysticism. “Clearly, the power of youthful idealism, some chalk, and random spray paint cannot be overestimated.”

“We knew we had to take a stand,” said Skylar Johansen, a protest leader and sophomore hospitality management major. “We gathered our most powerful weapon: cardboard signs with hashtags. Proven to fix the ills of any complicated multi-generational, continent-spanning, centuries-old geopolitical issue that our bucolic 224-year-old university was absolutely involved in. We chanted, we marched, and we even did a flash mob to ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ And just like that, the wars ended.”