July 27, 1953

Korean Armistice Agreement

Korean Armistice signed and ceasefire takes effect

The ceremony took about ten minutes and the two signatories exchanged no words. Shells and bombs then kept falling for another twelve hours.

10:00 a.m. at Panmunjom

At Panmunjom on 27 July 1953, Lieutenant General William K. Harrison Jr. signed for the United Nations Command and General Nam Il signed for the Korean People's Army and Chinese People's Volunteers. The ceremony began at 10:00 a.m., lasted about ten minutes, and the two men exchanged no words.

Eighteen identical trilingual copies were signed there. UNC commander General Mark W. Clark countersigned later that day at Munsan-ni, while Kim Il Sung and Peng Dehuai signed elsewhere rather than appearing together at Panmunjom.

Twelve more hours of shelling

The ceasefire did not begin when the delegates put down their pens. Artillery, air attacks and naval shelling continued until the armistice became effective at 10:00 p.m.

The agreement fixed a Military Demarcation Line along the final line of contact rather than the prewar 38th parallel, required each side to withdraw two kilometers to form a four-kilometer-wide Demilitarized Zone, and established machinery for supervision and prisoner repatriation.

A military agreement, not a peace

Military commands signed, not governments. South Korea was not a signatory — President Syngman Rhee opposed the armistice — and the United States participated through the United Nations Command rather than signing as a nation.

Disposition of prisoners of war had been the last major obstacle, resolved on 19 July after roughly two years of negotiation. The armistice suspended hostilities pending a political settlement, and no peace treaty has replaced it.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The July 27 date and the 10:00 p.m. effective time are firm. A detailed 2026 UNC reconstruction describes the paperwork as a multi-stage, multi-location sequence continuing into July 28, so accounts saying every commander signed together at Panmunjom on July 27 are misleading.
Calling this the day the Korean War “ended” is conventional but legally imprecise: it suspended hostilities pending a political settlement rather than concluding peace.