A peace plan can be negotiated in conference rooms. Securing it requires someone willing to stand on the ground. Gaza’s post-war framework has increasingly confronted that distinction. The UN Security Council-backed plan established the Board of Peace to oversee a transitional administration and authorized an International Stabilization Force (ISF) intended to provide security as Israeli forces withdraw and Palestinian institutions are rebuilt. Its responsibilities extend beyond monitoring a ceasefire. The force is expected to protect civilians, support humanitarian operations, train Palestinian police and assist with the decommissioning of weapons and military infrastructure (United Nations, 2025).
Yet assembling the force has proved more difficult than designing it. Albania, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and Morocco emerged as its initial troop contributors, while several Arab and Muslim-majority states expected to play an important role in Gaza’s post-war security have so far stopped short of comparable commitments (Board of Peace, 2026a). Even among countries prepared to participate, willingness to send personnel has not always meant willingness to undertake every part of the ISF’s mandate.
This gap is usually described as a staffing problem. It is better understood as a political one. Governments may agree that Gaza needs security, reconstruction and eventual demilitarization while remaining reluctant to place their own soldiers between Israeli forces, Palestinian armed groups and a population emerging from war.
The question is therefore not simply whether the ISF can recruit enough troops. It is whether enough governments consider the political settlement credible and legitimate enough to ask their soldiers to enforce it. The countries that show up, the countries that stay away, and the limits they place on their troops may ultimately reveal as much about Gaza’s transition as the peace plan itself.
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The difficulty begins with what the ISF is actually being asked to do. At first glance, much of its mandate resembles a familiar international stabilization operation, providing security while local institutions are rebuilt. Palestinian police are eventually intended to assume responsibility for maintaining law and order inside Gaza (Board of Peace, 2026b). Other parts of the mandate are considerably more difficult.
Resolution 2803 authorizes the ISF to support the demilitarization of Gaza, including the destruction of military infrastructure and permanent decommissioning of weapons held by non-state armed groups. Israeli withdrawal is also linked to verified progress on decommissioning (United Nations Security Council, 2025), with the ISF expected to act as a buffer as Palestinian authorities gradually assume control (Board of Peace, 2026a). This duty creates an important distinction between keeping peace and potentially having to enforce parts of one.
Monitoring a ceasefire or protecting aid deliveries requires a different level of political commitment from participating in the removal of weapons from an armed group that may not voluntarily surrender them. The distinction becomes even more important because negotiations over the roadmap have not fully resolved how the transition will proceed. As of May, the Board of Peace acknowledged that talks had not been finalized, while decommissioning remained tied to Israeli withdrawal and the expansion of Palestinian civilian control (Board of Peace, 2026a). The ISF is therefore being assembled before every political question surrounding its mission has been settled. For potential troop contributors, this leaves an uncomfortable question over what their soldiers could eventually be expected to do if cooperation breaks down.
Indonesia provides perhaps the clearest example of this problem. Jakarta initially prepared to make by far the largest contribution to the ISF, with 1,000 troops expected to be ready for deployment in April and as many as 8,000 available by June. Such a commitment would have supplied a significant share of the force originally envisioned for Gaza. It would also have brought in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, which does not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. But Indonesia placed clear limits on what those soldiers would do. Its Foreign Ministry described the proposed deployment as non-combatant and humanitarian, requiring Palestinian consent, and said Indonesian troops would have no mandate to demilitarize any party (Reuters, 2026a). This sits uneasily beside Resolution 2803, which includes the decommissioning of weapons and military infrastructure among the responsibilities of the wider ISF.
Indonesia’s deployment was later placed on indefinite hold following the escalation between Iran, Israel and the United States. Defense Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin also pointed to a lack of implementation guidelines and uncertainty over Washington’s commitment to the Board of Peace (Associated Press, 2026b). By August, Indonesian participation remained paused, while Uganda had committed around 1,200 personnel and Morocco up to 500 (Associated Press, 2026c).
This case exposes a weakness in measuring the ISF simply by the number of personnel pledged: a country can be willing to contribute thousands of soldiers without necessarily accepting every responsibility attached to the force.
The absence of larger Arab contingents is particularly important because these governments are not necessarily opposed to the wider plan. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar have supported elements of Gaza’s transition, while regional governments have also called for the deployment of an international stabilization force alongside Israeli withdrawal and the decommissioning of Palestinian armed groups (United Arab Emirates Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2026). The UAE has gone further by funding the training of a new Palestinian police force (Magid, 2026). Political support for the framework, however, has not translated into large numbers of Arab troops on the ground.
Part of the explanation lies in what participation could eventually require.
An Arab government sending troops into Gaza would have to consider the possibility that its soldiers could be placed between Israeli forces and armed Palestinians. If demilitarization remains contested, the mission could also expose those troops to accusations that they are enforcing an externally designed settlement against Palestinians rather than simply protecting a ceasefire. The problem would become more difficult if casualties occurred or if Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the roadmap remained uneven.
The calculations are not identical across the region either. Egypt shares a border with Gaza and has positioned itself as an important mediator, giving Cairo a direct interest in preventing instability while also making developments inside the territory particularly sensitive. Qatar and Türkiye have played important mediation roles with Hamas, while Gulf governments have increasingly focused on humanitarian assistance and diplomacy. The wider Iran conflict has added another constraint, forcing several governments to concentrate on security threats closer to home.
This creates a difficult trade-off for the ISF. Arab participation could strengthen the force’s regional legitimacy, but the countries capable of providing that legitimacy also have considerable political exposure if the mission becomes coercive. Supporting the idea of an international force is much easier than putting national soldiers in a position where they may have to decide what happens when the peace plan stops working as intended.
The smaller countries that have stepped forward should not be dismissed. Their contributions may be modest, but some are also highly specific. Kosovo, for example, has offered personnel including demining specialists (Associated Press, 2026a), while Albania plans initially to provide staff officers to the force’s command structure. Morocco occupies a different position altogether. As an Arab and Muslim-majority country with diplomatic relations with Israel, its participation could provide a degree of regional representation that European contributors cannot (Associated Press, 2026).
There may even be an advantage in relying on countries further removed from the conflict. Albania, Kosovo and Kazakhstan do not carry the same immediate political exposure as Egypt, Jordan or the Gulf states.
Their governments are less directly tied to negotiations between Israel and Palestinian factions, and participation is less likely to interfere with an existing role as mediator. Kosovo has also presented its involvement as part of its development from a recipient of international security assistance to a contributor to missions abroad (Associated Press, 2026a). But this advantage has limits. Specialist personnel can fill gaps in an international mission, while smaller contingents can broaden the coalition behind it. They cannot automatically provide the regional acceptance that substantial Arab participation might bring, nor can dozens of planners, medics or demining specialists substitute for thousands of troops if the ISF is eventually expected to operate across Gaza.
This leaves the ISF drawing on countries that can provide useful expertise and broaden its international character, but only some can supply personnel on the scale required. The states whose participation could carry greater weight in the region remain among the most difficult to bring into the force.
Beneath the staffing problem lies another difficulty: the order in which the peace plan is supposed to work. Israeli withdrawal is tied to progress on demilitarization, while Hamas has accepted a roadmap for decommissioning its weapons, but implementation remains tied to Israeli withdrawal and other steps under the wider peace plan (Reuters, 2026b). The ISF is meant to help bridge that transition, but the disagreement over sequencing places the force in an awkward position before it has even been fully assembled.
Potential contributors are effectively being asked to prepare for a mission whose most difficult stage still depends on negotiations outside their control. Governments may be more comfortable committing troops once disarmament and withdrawal are already progressing, yet those same processes may depend on an international force being present to provide security and confidence during the transition. This creates a circular problem.
The ISF needs political progress to make deployment easier, while the political process may need a credible ISF before that progress can safely take place. Until that sequence becomes clearer, uncertainty over the force’s composition is likely to remain tied to uncertainty over the settlement it is supposed to secure.
The ISF’s contributor list is therefore more than a measure of how many soldiers are available. It also offers a glimpse into how much confidence governments are willing to place in Gaza’s political transition. Smaller states can provide valuable personnel and expertise, while larger regional powers can support the framework through diplomacy, funding and training. But putting soldiers on the ground demands a different level of commitment.
Gaza already has much of the architecture for what is supposed to come next. The harder task is convincing enough governments that the political conditions exist to make that architecture work. A peace can be designed before every disagreement is settled. The force expected to secure it has less room for uncertainty.
