by Our Correspondent in Doha
The world is preparing to make, once again, the one mistake it never seems able to stop repeating: sending soldiers to manage a political problem that soldiers cannot solve. The UN Security Council will vote on Monday on a U.S.-sponsored International Stabilization Force (ISF) for Gaza—20,000 foreign troops, no Americans among them, handed a mandate that sounds deceptively simple: secure Gaza, disarm Hamas, oversee a transition, and somehow not get dragged into a regional firestorm. It is precisely the kind of plan that collapses under the weight of its own wishful thinking.
Washington insists this is nothing like Iraq or Afghanistan. But the insistence itself is a confession. The U.S. is trying to outsource risk while retaining control over the political architecture. That is why the most controversial component of the plan—a so-called Board of Peace to administer Gaza’s transition—has already triggered alarms across the world. China and Russia want it removed entirely. Arab states privately question who will lead it, what authority it would have, and whether Palestinians will see it as anything other than a foreign-appointed caretaker government.
The UAE, usually cautious even when displeased, has now broken ranks publicly. Emirati diplomats say there is “no clear framework” for the force, no clarity on funding, logistics, or legitimacy. They also raise the central political question the U.S. draft sidesteps: what role, if any, will the Palestinian Authority play? The anxious tone coming from Abu Dhabi is not accidental. It reflects a growing fear that the ISF is not a peacekeeping mission but a political vacuum disguised as a security operation.
Russia has seized the moment with characteristic opportunism. Moscow has tabled an alternative draft that removes the Board of Peace and asks the UN Secretary-General to produce governance options consistent with international law. It is a cynical move, given Russia’s own behavior in Ukraine, but an effective one: it paints the U.S. plan as improvised and extralegal, and positions Russia as the defender of due process. In the diplomatic arena, perception matters more than sincerity.
And all of this is happening before a single troop sets foot in Gaza.
The deeper problem is that Gaza is not a security problem waiting for armed monitors. It is a political crisis rooted in decades of dispossession, blockade, factionalism, and unilateral force. Sending 20,000 foreign soldiers into the Strip without a political horizon is not stabilization—it is managed chaos. Foreign forces will not be greeted as liberators. They will be treated as occupiers wearing different insignia.
Yitzhak Rabin once warned, “We must fight terrorism as if there’s no peace process, and pursue peace as if there’s no terrorism.” The ISF draft flips that logic upside down. It demands peacekeeping before there is peace, disarmament before there is governance, and stability before there is legitimacy. That is a recipe not for order but for escalation by another name.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership’s remembered warnings feel painfully relevant. Yasser Arafat often repeated, “We seek the peace of the brave,” meaning peace rooted in political courage, not external policing. Mahmoud Abbas later echoed the same frustration when he said, “Peace cannot be made by one side alone.” Yet the ISF proposal asks Arab states to take casualties, take responsibility, and take the blame, while giving them almost no influence over Gaza’s political future.
None of this is lost on the countries expected to send troops. Saudi Arabia does not want to be entangled in a counterinsurgency. Egypt has no appetite to police Gaza again. Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Jordan understand that disarming Hamas is not a tactical task but a generational one. Even Qatar and the UAE—often on opposite ends of regional diplomacy—share a fear that this mission will brand them as collaborators in an externally imposed arrangement that lacks Palestinian consent.
And yet Washington continues pushing the Security Council toward a vote it seems determined to interpret as success. But a resolution is not a strategy. A mandate is not a plan. And a mission without political legitimacy is not peacekeeping—it is a trap.
Israel, for its part, knows exactly what Gaza represents. David Ben-Gurion once remarked, “It matters not what the world says about Israel; it matters what the Jews do.” In Gaza, Israel has long operated under the assumption that the world’s disapproval is manageable but Gaza’s instability is not. Israel will not object to a mission in which others bear the risk and responsibility. It will quietly welcome an arrangement that allows it continued operational freedom while others manage the fallout.
But the region should read the fine print. The ISF will be tasked with “disarming non-state actors.” In Gaza, that means entering dense urban terrain, confronting armed groups embedded within civilian populations, navigating vast underground tunnel systems, and absorbing the political anger of two million Palestinians who have watched external forces reshape their lives without their consent for generations. This is not peacekeeping. It is counterinsurgency under diplomatic cover.
The world has been here before, and it almost always ends the same way: an initial surge of diplomatic optimism, followed by mission creep, political stalemate, disillusionment, rising casualties, and eventual withdrawal. What remains afterward is bitterness and vacuum.
Gaza does not need stabilization forces. It needs political resolution, sovereign institutions, and a future in which Palestinians are not governed by foreigners or militias but by themselves. Without that, every international mission becomes another layer of the problem rather than part of the solution.
The ISF is not the path to peace. It is the world preparing to step into Gaza without understanding the cost—or the consequences. The question now is whether global leaders will recognize the trap before they walk into it, or whether Gaza will become, once again, the place where political imagination goes to die and foreign soldiers go to bleed.
