International Troops Will Enter Gaza as a Pilot Program Hoping Not to Face Fate of Previous Peacekeepers

In a gesture to President Trump, Israel for the first time since October 7, 2023, is allowing foreign troops to enter Gaza in an initial step toward implementing the president’s 20-point peace plan, which as a first step envisions the disarming of Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet approved over the weekend the entry into Gaza of 200 troops from friendly countries, including Morocco and Uganda. The move was designed to jumpstart the Trump peace plan’s International Stabilization Force, which is envisioned to grow into a 20,000-troop group charged with maintaining order in the Strip. The full deployment, though, is expected only once Hamas is disarmed and Israel withdraws from Gaza. The Israeli cabinet’s decision followed negotiations at Cairo, which were presided over by the director general of Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov. The veteran Bulgarian diplomat is so highly esteemed at Washington that America is reportedly pushing him to succeed the current United Nation secretary general, Antonio Guterres, once the latter’s term ends on December 31.The Israeli decision is “a critical part of the agreed framework for stabilizing Gaza, supporting demilitarization, and enabling the transition to effective Palestinian transitional administration,” Mr. Mladenov writes on X. “The focus now is on ensuring that we move forward with the 20-point Plan for Gaza.” A sort of an equilibrium is holding in Gaza. It’s “an interim situation that both Israel and Hamas can live with, at least for now,” a former chief of the Israel Defense Forces intelligence research arm, Yossi Kuperwasser, tells The New York Sun. Jerusalem’s decision to allow into Gaza a pilot of foreign peacekeepers, he adds, is “first and foremost a gesture made to America,” while Israel’s focus is elsewhere — especially on Iran. In Hamas’s areas of control, it is quietly rearming, re-digging destroyed attack tunnels, and reasserting its brutal control over the population. Israel, meanwhile, is slowly widening a “yellow line” security zone that by now contains nearly 70 percent of the Strip’s territory. The IDF is also systematically eliminating Hamas terrorists who were involved in the planning, executing, hostage holding, and participating in the October 7, 2023, massacre.A Board of Peace headquarters, designed to monitor last October’s ceasefire, was built at the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat. That American and international-staffed facility, known as the Civil-Military Coordination Center, recently denied a Reuters report of its demise. The Moroccan-Uganadan group that Israel approved for Southern Gaza will operate in areas held by the IDF, and will coordinate with the army. Letting the foreigners into the strip “is not what we wanted, but we have no choice, the whole world is pressuring us,” Knesset Member David Bitan of Netanyahu’s Likud party told Army Radio last week. “We need to show that we are not the ones who will violate the agreement.” Skeptics of the Gaza Plan: Senator GrahamParts of last October’s Gaza plan were widely welcomed by Israelis. Mostly, Israelis were delighted about the return of the last of the hostages that Hamas had kept in captivity since October 7, including the bodies of murdered Israelis. Jerusalem, though, was less enthusiastic about a vision of a peaceful Gaza, complete with what it saw as unrealistic future plans for a peaceful “seaside metropolis” strewn with hotels and Atlantic City-like boardwalks. It sounded unrealistic. “What did I learn on this trip?” Senator Linsey Graham, who was laid to rest this week at Washington, said after a visit to Israel last December. “Hamas is not disarming. They’re rearming. Hamas is not abandoning power. They’re consolidating power.” That, he added, “is what the military intelligence people in Israel tell me. That’s what the IDF told me. That’s what our own people told me.” The UN Security Council nevertheless backed a “comprehensive plan to end the Gaza conflict,” which wrote into international law Mr. Trump’s 20-point peace plan. The resolution authorized the International Stabilizing Force to replace Israeli troops in Gaza — but not before Hamas is disarmed and a government of Palestinian “technocrats” replaces the terrorists in power. International Peacekeeping Forces: A Checkered HistoryIn May of 1967, one month before the Six Days War, President Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered the evacuation of a UN force that had been stationed in Gaza since the 1956 Suez crisis. The UN obliged. Leaving a post while threats to Israel grew was an early warning sign to Israelis that international peacekeepers are far from a guarantee that peace would be kept. After Israel dismantled all its Gaza settlements and IDF posts as part of the 2005 disengagement plan, it agreed to a non-UN contingency of observers from European Union countries, mandated to man the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza to prevent arms smuggling. Under Hamas threats, the operation abandoned its post two years later. A UN Interim Force in Lebanon was meant to assist the Lebanese army in disarming Hezbollah after the 2006 war between Israel and the Iran-backed terror organization. UNIFIL’s turned out so ineffective that the UN Security Council, under American pressure, ordered it to dissolve by the end of this year. While the Gaza international force is authorized by the UN council, it does not operate as a blue-helmeted UN peacekeeping operation. Still questions remain whether these foreign troops might meet the same ending as their Mideast predecessors? “What’s the mandate of this force?” the author of “The Arab Case For Israel,” Hussain Abdul Hussain, tells the Sun. “If you are an ISF soldier and you see a Hamas guy in Gaza killing a Palestinian person, do you have the mandate to shoot to stop the homicides unfolding? I don’t see that they do.”Yellow Lines: American PressureUnwilling to rely on foreign troops, Israel has created security zones of various widths in southern Lebanon, southwest Syria, and Gaza. America is quietly pressuring the Israelis to limit their presence in these areas, including Gaza. There and in Judea and Samaria, though, “Hamas wants to create mayhem,” Mr. Kuperwasser, who heads the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, says.

International Troops Will Enter Gaza as a Pilot Program Hoping Not to Face Fate of Previous Peacekeepers

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