On August 17, Jared Kushner, Nickolay Mladenov and other Board of Peace representatives met with Binyamin Netanyahu to discuss the sequencing of Hamas disarmament and Israeli troop withdrawal, as well as Washington’s requests for Israel to restrict the use of force to imminent threats only. On August 18th, following the meeting, Israel bombed a cafe at the Gaza port, killing six Palestinians according to medic reports. On August 19, Reuters revealed that Congress was notified of more than $206 million in planned International Stabilisation Force (ISF) funding, a force which operates under the Board of Peace, despite unresolved deployment. On the same day, a strike on a Gazan police station killed nine more Palestinians, including a thirteen-year-old girl. This week, the controversy has escalated, with Israel publicly threatening stronger action, confirming that Palestinian children’s kites will be classed as weapons of war, and killing a four-year-old boy in recent strikes.
This confirmed ISF funding reveals deeper problems within the institutions governing the use of force, namely that these institutions remain politically subordinate to the actors who are using the force in the first place. This article will examine who has actually been funded by this notification, who possesses the capacity to use and constrain force, and what happens when internationally codified legal limits meet the Israeli regime’s determination to operate with military freedom. In a less material manner, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the new funding announcement also function as a rare live test; can post-1945 international norms constrain a militarily dominant actor when the principal financier of settlement efforts both depends on that actor for implementation and is that actor’s closest global ally?
The Funding Notification
Reuters’ report on August 19 refers to the pair of congressional funding notifications from July 30th. These are $200 million for ISF equipment, infrastructure, vehicles and operational costs, and a further $6.3 million for nine US armoured personnel carriers being repurposed for ISF use. Albania and Kosovo were identified as the initial recipients of those vehicles (add detail on why that matters at all). Importantly, the State Department described this funding as “initial”; the final composition and cost of the ISF remain unclear, as does the deployment date of ISF personnel. The US has provided start-up funding for the Force, and is using institutional avenues to determine its infrastructure, logistics and operational abilities.
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With the Force being kitted out by the biggest military power in the world, concerns arise regarding whether the current conditions in Gaza, and lack of agreement between Israel and Palestine, are conducive to the introduction of a powerful, politically partisan paramilitary unit. UNSC Resolution 2803 authorises member states working with the Board of Peace (which includes no G7 states apart from the USA) to establish an, ostensibly temporary, ISF and its mission. At present, its mandate includes ceasefire monitoring, humanitarian mission support, deconfliction, border security, civilian protection, and Palestinian police training. Its mandate also includes the decommissioning and destruction of Hamas’ military infrastructure. The possibility of parallel demilitarisation of elements of the IDF has not been discussed. The Board’s own May report clarifies that the ISF operates under a unified US command in consultation with Egypt and Israel. The ISF takes neither orders nor consultation from Palestinian representatives. The ISF has a legal mandate, if shaky, but the political and operational conditions necessary to exercise that mandate remain unsettled; civilian (and child) bombing continues despite pushback from Washington, humanitarian access remains restricted, and the death toll of politically unrepresented Palestinians continues to climb.
An important distinction in terms of ISF’s funding also separates it from the Board of Peace. On February 19th, Trump promised a US contribution of $10 billion to the “Peace” committee itself. The $206 million revealed by Reuters is funding specifically for the Board of Peace’s own Force. In terms of hegemonic stability theory, scholars like Robert Gilpin and Charles Kindleberger would likely emphasise the pivotal role of a dominant power possessing the resources and political willingness to underwrite and perpetuate specific world orders. The nominally multinational ISF receives critical funding from the US and operates under US command, thus ‘international’ nomenclature alone cannot eliminate the underlying, hegemonic hierarchy of power that determines its actions. Through the hegemonic lens, America is not just a moneyed patron, but an architect.
The potential for the US-led Board of Peace and ISF to genuinely solve problems in the region is potentially inhibited by this conflict of interest; as an institution, the Board and its new militia cannot be expected to neutrally contain dominant states when the funder of the institution is allied with a dominant state – the Board-ISF institutional system is materially reliant on the US, thus vulnerable to being swayed by its preferences. The US is militarily, economically, and politically integrated with Israel, thus vulnerable to its institutional commands being influenced by Israeli interests. To the cynical observer, the whole affair may appear rather circular: Israel arguably uses US funding (unconditioned military aid), diplomatic shielding, and infrastructure financing to continue apartheid in Palestine, the US funds a peacekeeping initiative which includes Israel as a peacemaking state, and Israel-US politico-economic links ensure that the status quo (hegemonic stability) is perpetuated in the region.
The ISF and its funding are being presented as neutral peacekeeping tools, not as a new iteration of US-Israeli military integration. This is a slightly dubious characterisation. Given the level of alignment between the White House and Israel, are we to believe that there would be this much funding if the Board of Peace and ISF planned on treating Palestinian and Israeli groups equally during peacemaking? With no effort made to remedy the diplomatic asymmetry between the US-Israel coalition and Palestine, and a marked absence of Palestinian representatives on the Board, are we to believe that Palestinian voices, goals and needs will be given a second thought?
Even this cynicism assumes that peacemaking is the most likely outcome, here. Beyond the cynic’s scepticism, the pessimist may look back at the Lebanon framework from June as a comparative case, wherein Israel and Lebanon agreed to a US-mediated ceasefire but Israeli forces continued to occupy the security zone in Southern Lebanon. Will the US-led Board of Peace, like the US-mediated settlement, simply be an administrative front to perpetuate and legitimise Israeli violence? While the Gaza situation is in no way identical to Lebanon’s, both demonstrate the difficulties involved in building a neutral and fairly-negotiated security regime when one party retains vastly superior material power and military capacity. The question is no longer one of the ISF’s funding, which is confirmed, but of what ISF actions and outputs the current political order in Israel and Palestine will lead to.
The Strikes
Following the August 17 meeting between Netanyahu and the Board delegation, the US confirmed that Israel retains the ability to act against imminent threats, and that a deconfliction mechanism was agreed. Israeli attacks on the 18th, 19th and 23rd were not immediately responded to by the Board or the US government at the time, despite the extraordinarily close timing of the meeting and the strikes.
By August 26th, however, Mladenov had publicly and explicitly criticised recent Israeli military operations as undermining disarmament. Unfortunately, his criticisms were not reinforced with any substantial material consequences for Israel – such as a reduction in US military funding or support. The eventual light response makes the problem not one of institutional silence but of institutional leverage; by August 26th, its representative was openly warning that Israeli strikes were undermining the ceasefire, yet the central question of which mechanism exactly could compel compliance remained unanswered.
Kites: Parallel Escalation Logic
Reuters reports that Israel responded to kite and balloon launches from Gaza with threats of intensified military action, and subsequent bombing from Israel included a strike in Zawayda which killed a four year-old-boy. Israel confirmed that the attacks were in response to balloons, drones and kites. Gazan parents were later urged to stop their children from flying kites as a result of Israeli threats, yet local accounts stressed that the children’s kite-flying had no malicious or military purpose. Further reporting affirms that kites which crossed into Israeli territory were examined by the Israeli military and were found to contain no explosives. Israeli officials assert that kites and balloons will be treated as security threats, while the recent incidents reported on by Reuters involved kites with no incendiary devices.
The kite escalation shows how normal phenomena (children’s toys) are turned into security questions which can justify exceptional and violent responses beyond the realms of ordinary politics. The ordinary object is rhetorically transformed into a threat, is framed as pivotal/unavoidable in security strategy, and is used to justify a brutal response. The point is not necessarily that every single kite ever flown by a Palestinian will be harmless, but rather that, even where an object does pose an actual safety concern, that concern alone does not negate the politico-legal questions of an appropriate, proportionate response.
Under international humanitarian law, attacks are generally divided between military objectives and civilian objects and between civilians and combatants. Proportionality prohibits attacks where expected civilian harms would be excessive compared to the projected military advantage – and parties must take precautions to protect the civilians in question. Under Israel’s treatment of threats, the possibility of a military advantage seemingly outweighs the child and civilian harm incurred at its expense; the line between militant and civilian is blurred, and anyone doing anything other than obediently hiding may be construed as a malicious actor by the IDF.
The kite episode is important when considering the future of the ISF, the unit with the ability to shape the material conditions of ceasefire and reconstruction. Would the supposedly neutral peacekeeping force keep the Israeli view of the kites and balloons, given the representation of Israeli voices in their leading ranks? As Israel proves, with its treatment of children’s kites, that the rules and laws of international relations are rather malleable with enough political will and resources. One wonders if the ISF requires further prescription over who gets to define threats, who sets evidentiary thresholds and who is subject to review – to keep the Israeli standards would be to begin building peace on structurally uneven and inequitable foundations. If Israel and the Board cannot agree on the meaning of an ‘imminent’ threat before the ISF is even deployed, what hope is there of adjudicating that disagreement once boots are on the ground?
The Minister
Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, announced on social media that he believed Israel’s forces should conduct nightly targeted killings (of approximately 30 to 40 people per night), going far beyond those posing an immediate threat. Ben-Gvir is a powerful member of the governing apparatus – whose rhetoric and ideology has a wide and influential reach. If public figures are announcing such notions to the world, one wonders what is discussed behind the closed doors of the Knesset.
Germany publicly condemned these remarks as unacceptable and contrary to international law, and the EU followed suit on the grounds of them being egregious and inciteful. The EU also said such ideas should not be left unchecked, but is yet to do much about checking them. France, describing them as unacceptable and inhumane, had already barred Ben-Gvir from entering France following the EU High Representative’s comment in June that member states had proposed sanctions against Ben-Gvir but that the necessary unanimity was lacking. However, the travel restriction arguably doesn’t do much to deal with Ben-Gvir; while it shows a surface-level condemnation from France, it in no way inhibits him from continuing his inflammatory, brutal rhetoric – it simply prevents him from doing it in France.
Typical scholarly work on international norms (e.g. the writings of Finnemore and Sikkink) establish a ‘life cycle’ framework of the norm’s emergence, its international cascade and its eventual internalisation. That cycle has changed trajectories with regard to Israel’s apartheid; condemnation demonstrates the existence of a continued underlying normative standard, but condemnation without corresponding substantive intervention may indicate incomplete internalisation. The rhetoric of tolerance, non-violence and humanitarianism lives on, yet its counterpart – 30 or 40 killings per night – can still exist in the policy conversation zeitgeist without much in the way of intervention. The norm has not collapsed, rather it is being articulated more than it is being enforced.
The Wider Picture
The familiar narrative of Westphalian statehood is a widely debated one, but the modern international system nevertheless contains powerful norms about territorial sovereignty, non-intervention and juridical equality. These sentiments are reflected and codified in Article 2 of the UN Charter, which mentions sovereign equality, good-faith obligation fulfillment and prohibitions on the threat and use of force. Thus, while Westphalianism (a historically contested narrative) cannot be said to be collapsing, we can certainly argue that the Gaza case illustrates a recurring mismatch between formal sovereignty provisions and actual distributions of coercive power.
Contemporarily, an increasingly important factor in coercive power is the military’s use and integration of AI, a concern raised regarding the Israeli military by Human Rights Watch. The organisation worries that machine-learning systems’ algorithmic outputs can be biased and unreliable, often built on incomplete underlying data. Human Rights Watch has also connected AI-enabled targeting to a wider automation bias; a preference among human operators for relying on machine outputs. The lack of external monitoring and regulation on the systems Israel is using is a worry both in terms of Palestinian lives and in terms of changes to the general nature of future warfare. Even if the Stabilisation Force can establish clear rules of engagement, they would operate downstream from (and, considering the Board of Peace’s key members, subordinate to) the intelligence and targeting decisions generated by Israel and its AI-assissted attack systems. The attack systems themselves operate under an opaque chain of accountability; the early stages of the assessments of civilian harm (intelligence collection, algorithmic checks) are subject to limited human oversight.
In the broader outlook, the concerns about the ability of a stabilisation force to be safely introduced into a still-war-torn Gaza are centred on four mismatches: between material capacity and political conditions, between the formal mandate and the coercive reality, between normative condemnation and substantive behavioural change and between threat classification and neutral external adjudication.
If unresolved, these mismatches could mean that the deployment of the ISF worsens an already fraught and brutal situation. The viability of the ISF can therefore be assessed against several falsifiable indicators. These could include the publication/clarification of operational rules (e.g. command authority, rules for IDF interaction, procedures to respond to alleged Hamas violations), funding conditionality (e.g. based on Hamas disarmament milestones, Israeli withdrawal milestones, Palestinian police deployment) or the use of the deconfliction mechanism.
The Gaza situation, as ever, is multifaceted, violent and tragic. Israel’s behaviour may not align itself with humanitarian standards without external coercive pressure, and normative condemnation alone may simply be insufficient. The ISF, as a concept, has the potential to vastly improve well-being in Gaza while also addressing Israeli security concerns. As a partisan, unmonitored extension of the integrated US-Israeli military, however, it could also have the potential to make the situation far worse.
