"halt hostilities" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to the cessation of violent activities, typically those between two opposing forces. For example: "The two sides agreed to halt hostilities in order to negotiate a peace treaty."
After signing, both sides agreed to issue immediate orders to halt hostilities, prompting applause from delegates and a mediation team led by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.
"Australia continues to call on all parties to immediately honour their commitments to halt hostilities and to begin an inclusive, peaceful political dialogue," she said in a statement.
Here's a roundup of the latest developments: Israel and Hamas agreed to a UN request to halt hostilities for five hours on humanitarian grounds.
Both sides said they would halt hostilities at 7 30 p.m. Sunday, and about that time, the explosions that had been heard regularly in the capital largely stopped.
The LNA said it had carried out its first air raid on a Tripoli suburb, defying calls by the international community to halt hostilities.
The plan was to halt hostilities, allow humanitarian groups access to combat zones, and – crucially, given that elections in the world's youngest state have been postponed until at least 2017 – start planning for a transitional government.
Within hours of the blasts, the PKK announced a temporary ceasefire before November's elections, halting hostilities to allow the election to proceed safely under "equal and fair" conditions.
In one of the conflict's most famous episodes, troops fighting on the Western front halted hostilities to play a game in no-man's land and later posed for pictures and exchanged gifts on Christmas Day 1914.
Hamas has said Palestinian armed groups in Gaza have agreed to a ceasefire as long as Israel also halts hostilities, after the most intense flare-up of fighting since the war in 2014.
In his incomparable book, "L'Ennemi Américain," Philippe Roger describes anti-Americanism as a constant of French political life, "halting hostilities between factions in the face of supposed common enemy" and in "manufacturing a tissue of consensus".
The 4-kilometer-wide, 248-kilometer-long DMZ has been a no-man's land since an armistice halted hostilities in 1953.
