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Foreign forces in Gaza will fail

Only the Israel Defense Forces can truly defang Hamas.

Reservists of the IDF’s 16th Infantry Brigade, also known as the Jerusalem Brigade, operating in the northern Gaza Strip during the week of Jan. 11, 2026. Credit: IDF.
Reservists of the IDF’s 16th Infantry Brigade, also known as the Jerusalem Brigade, operating in the northern Gaza Strip during the week of Jan. 11, 2026. Credit: IDF.

(JNS) Here we go again. The so-called “international community,” led by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff of the Trump administration, alongside the European Union and a panoply of questionable Arab “allies,” is rushing in to “stabilize” the Middle East.

A convoluted and fantastical array of “technical” and “security” structures is supposedly going to bring good governance, deradicalization and demilitarization to Gaza.

Poppycock, especially the part about disarming Hamas.

Nobody but the Israeli army is truly going to clear the Gaza Strip of weapons aimed at Israel, from guns to rockets to terror attack tunnels. Nobody but the Israel Defense Forces is going to confront and crush Hamas’s remaining 30,000 or so fighters.

Nobody but the Israeli military can prevent Hamas from rearming or reimposing its reign of terror on Palestinians in Gaza. And nobody but Israel can thwart the flow of money to Hamas, whether from Turkey, Qatar or Iran.

In fact, the fanciful Kushner vision of a “Riviera” in Gaza—an Eden-like oasis of high-tech progress and luxury living—may already be serving as a conduit for a surge of cash to the same corrupt and venal Palestinians who have occupied and destroyed Gaza over the past generation.

Through US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, Israel has been presented with gobbledygook: a dazzling and dizzying assortment of new and recycled guarantors of stability with serious-sounding acronyms—EUBAM, GAC, NCAG, ISF, PSF, CMCC, DDDR and more.

The European Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM), along with its counterpart, the EU Mission for the Support of Palestinian Police and Rule of Law, is meant to guard the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza and prevent bad actors and dangerous goods from entering.

It is convenient but reckless to forget that EUBAM officers, together with Palestinian Authority policemen, fled Rafah with their pants around their ankles when Hamas violently seized Gaza in 2007.

There is no reason to believe these European monitors will show any more spine today in the face of Hamas threats than they did then.

The Gaza Administrative Committee, also known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, is theorized as a “non-partisan, technocratic body” to manage civilian affairs, made up of “non-affiliated” Palestinian bureaucrats—people who supposedly do not owe their lives and livelihoods to Hamas. Yet these would be many of the same Palestinians who worked in the Hamas-run administration before Oct. 7, 2023.

There is no reason to believe that such fearless, genuinely non-affiliated Palestinians exist in Gaza.

The proposed International Stabilization Force would consist of troops from countries around the world—though there are currently no serious volunteers beyond the Turks—to train and oversee a Palestinian Security Force drawn from Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s various militias in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and allegedly deradicalized Gazan fighters.

There is no reason to believe that such an international force, if it ever materializes, or such Palestinian units will strip Hamas fighters of their weapons or remove Hamas leaders from their de facto control of Gaza.

No officer in these forces will dare intercept aid or money flowing to Hamas, or expose new terror tunnels being dug beneath Shifa Hospital or along the Philadelphi Corridor.

The Civil-Military Coordination Center, already operating in Kiryat Gat with hundreds of US Army officers and foreign representatives, is expected to oversee all of the above, along with humanitarian aid, Gaza reconstruction and the implementation of Disarmament, Demobilization, Deradicalization and Reintegration.

It all sounds lovely. It amounts to an imagined paradise. But it is claptrap.

It is ridiculous to expect Hamas to melt away in the face of this alphabet soup of international do-gooders. Hamas will instead bamboozle, threaten, bribe or eliminate any European monitor, American official or Egyptian overseer who gets in its way.

And Hamas will have Qatari and Turkish officials—its increasingly assertive Muslim Brotherhood backers—embedded in Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace” and Gaza Executive Board to run cover for the terror group and refill its coffers as needed.

Egypt offers a clear example of why Israel must never rely on Arab actors or the international community for its core security.

Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel and presents itself as a Western partner in stabilizing Gaza. Yet it is among the fiercest purveyors of anti-Israel and antisemitic messaging in the Arab world—and a longtime adversary of the Palestinians themselves.

Egypt did nothing to stop Hamas from overthrowing the Palestinian Authority and seizing Gaza. It allowed the Sinai Peninsula under its control to become a hub for international terrorism and large-scale weapons and drug smuggling into Gaza and Israel.

By turning a blind eye to—and benefiting from—this massive smuggling industry, Egypt helped transform Hamas-ruled Gaza into a major Islamist terror base, paving the way for the Oct. 7 massacre.

Over the past two years, the IDF has uncovered more than 100 smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egypt border. There is no credible scenario in which Egyptian police, military and political officials were unaware of or did not approve this activity.

It is also worth remembering that Egypt cares even less about Palestinians than it does about Israel. It has kept Gaza sealed for decades, denied medical treatment to wounded Palestinians during the past two years of war, and refused to offer refuge in Sinai to those fleeing the fighting.

The idea of once again placing the Rafah border crossing and the Philadelphi Corridor under Egyptian supervision, alongside flimsy EUBAM monitors and only token Israeli involvement, is not only preposterous. It is dangerous.

Only full-scale, permanent IDF control of Gaza’s southern border can guarantee Israel’s security.

Ultimately, only the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities can offer Gaza any chance of recovery and Israel any chance of long-term security. And only the IDF can achieve that.

All the fancy mechanisms now being floated will do little more than get in the way—or worse, entrench Hamas even further.

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About the author

Patrick Callahan

This is an example of author bio/description. Beard fashion axe trust fund, post-ironic listicle scenester. Uniquely mesh maintainable users rather than plug-and-play testing procedures.

One response to “Foreign forces in Gaza will fail”

  1. Susan says:

    The IDF with God’s backing!!!

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