About 20 miles from Gaza, the United States has taken over a large and long-vacated industrial complex, where it has set up a civil-military coordination center. At any given time, approximately 200 American soldiers and officials are milling about in the facility in Kiryat Gat, a town in southern Israel. They are the United States’  eyes and ears, monitoring the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. 

It’s clear that they are not meant to be deployed as a combat team to enforce the next stages of the Trump administration’s peace plan. But neither is anyone else. None of the United States’ allies or Arab partners have signaled any willingness to send troops to police Hamas if it refuses to disarm. 

The international stabilization force (ISF) that has been envisaged to sufficiently assuage Israeli concerns and enable the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to leave Gaza, as well as to keep the peace that paves the way for Gaza’s reconstruction, faces daunting challenges ahead. Who is willing to commit troops, and who will Israel accept? Who will fight Hamas, and who might try to preserve Hamas? 

The first obstacle to deploying such a force is the presence of Hamas itself, since no one wants to fight the group. If Hamas refuses to disarm, as appears to be the case, then it’s unlikely that any states—Western or Arab—will want to send troops to Gaza. Since the cease-fire was struck, armed Hamas fighters have condemned civilians as “collaborators” and publicly executed them at point-blank range. According to some media, Hamas has appointed five new governors in various districts of the Gaza Strip and started a war with influential clans in Gaza to assert dominance. 

Hamas has also mobilized thousands of fighters, at least 7,000 on the first day of the latest cease-fire, according to some reports. The group could prove to be a competitive opposition to an ISF that still doesn’t have a set number of required troops.

Three former Israeli security officials, who held senior ranks, told Foreign Policy that they did not expect Hamas to disarm. “By the looks of it, by the way they are killing people, I don’t see them disarming,” said Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesperson and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 

If Hamas doesn’t disarm, then the war could restart as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed. U.S. President Donald Trump has said that if Hamas doesn’t give up its weapons, then “we will disarm them,” and he added it will be quick and perhaps violent. Since the United States doesn’t plan on sending any troops to Gaza, it will presumably use kinetic action from afar and back a plan from Netanyahu. That, however, could potentially restart active military conflict that Trump claims to have ended forever. 

“The only thing that made Hamas release the hostages was military pressure. If there’s not going to be military pressure, I don’t believe they’re going to disarm,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, a former head of the IDF’s research division. “Right now, I don’t think that there is one because President Trump doesn’t want the war to continue.”

Whether Hamas disarms or not, he said, depends on Turkey and Qatar—the two countries that played an instrumental role in getting Hamas to agree to release the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

Kuperwasser said that Turkey and Qatar may pressure Hamas “because if they do not deliver, all kinds of things that Americans have promised them are not necessarily going to materialize. So they have to deliver and prove that they really have leverage over Hamas.”

Qatar runs the risk of jeopardizing its newly inked security agreement with the United States, under which any attack on Qatar would be seen “as a threat to the peace and security of the United States” itself. The United States otherwise only offers such security guarantees to its NATO partners. Turkey wants F-16 advanced fighter jets from the United States, and it wants to be at the table as the region’s top influencer. 

The second challenge for the ISF is the general unwillingness of other countries to take a policing role in Gaza. 

On a visit to Israel, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, said the United States will not deploy troops to Gaza. French President Emmanuel Macron has said that France is ready to train Palestinian forces to handle Gaza’s security but hasn’t committed to sending French troops to enforce peace against Hamas. Arab states are the least likely to pick up arms against Hamas. “Our Arab partners will not shoot at Hamas, that much we know,” said  Eran Lerman, Israel’s former deputy national security advisor.

“Peacekeeping is that you’re sitting there supporting the local police force, the Palestinians, which Jordan and Egypt are willing to train in large numbers, but that takes time,” Jordanian King Abdullah II recently told the BBC. 

“If we’re running around Gaza on patrol with weapons, that’s not a situation that any country would like to get involved in.”

Egypt is likely to lead the ISF, with Jordan also participating. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar are likely to provide reconstruction support while Indonesia, a Muslim-majority nation in the Indo-Pacific region, is the only country to offer to send 20,000 soldiers. Pakistan, also with a Muslim majority, is among the potential candidates, too, as is Azerbaijan and Turkey. Among Europeans, Italy has said that it would be ready to send troops but as part of a peacekeeping mission. 

Israel has its own parameters to assess the bids, including the dominant ideological leanings of the government sending troops. It prefers troops from friendly Arab nations that it has good relations with, such as Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE. All these countries have managed to rein in the Muslim Brotherhood that Israel sees as a fountainhead of Islamic jihad. Hamas’s roots can be traced back to the group’s Palestinian branch.

Lerman said Israelis would welcome “Indonesians and Azeris” but weren’t sure about Pakistanis. Others have said that Pakistan is seen as closer to Turkey’s Islamist political vocabulary than the UAE or Egypt. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is widely thought of as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. In the Israeli view, a Turkish force on the ground in Gaza will strengthen Hamas and reinforce the security threat instead of diminishing it. 

Qatar is seen in a similar vein—as the financial supporter of the group that sustained Hamas’s bureaucracy in Gaza before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.  Kobi Michael, an expert in state-building operations and a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, told  media that if Turkish or Qatari soldiers are a part of the ISF, then they will try to preserve Hamas rather than dismantle it. He said they”have a direct interest that the ISF fails” in its mission. 

Israel will accept Italy’s participation in the ISF as Rome did not recognize a Palestinian state. But it is skeptical of a British and French role. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure that we can trust the Brits and the French. They were useful idiots for Hamas,” Kuperwasser said. “But there are enough countries in Europe that we do trust, like Poland and Czech Republic and other countries in Central Europe. I hope they are going to make a contribution.”

Experts said the key question that needs to be answered is whether the ISF will be a peacekeeping force or a multinational policing force that is expected to shoot at Hamas fighters when needed. 

For its part, Israel opposes a force like the United Nations’ peacekeeping operation in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, which primarily had a monitoring role and, according to Israelis, neither had the will nor the mandate to take on Hezbollah. 

France, the United Kingdom, and the United States are pushing for a resolution at the U.N. Security Council that calls for the creation of a U.N. mandated force similar to Haiti’s multinational Gang Suppression Force, which is authorized to use arms. But Egypt, which is expected to be at the forefront of the mission, is sending mixed signals. It believes the ISF should be allowed to maintain security but not to fight any of the armed factions in Gaza. Some reporting suggests that Egypt is advocating for a long-term cease-fire that allows Hamas to give up its weapons and reenter the political fray but under the supervision of Gaza International Transitional Authority. 

Lerman pointed to a possible solution that he described as “the most likely” scenario. He said that Hamas might be quietly allowed to hold the territory that it currently controls, which is around 47 percent of Gazan territory, which is home to most of its population, while Israel hands over the remaining 53 percent that it holds to the ISF. Then, along with international partners, the United Nations and Israel could unleash large-scale economic prosperity in the ISF-run part of Gaza. 

Lerman called it a “new Gaza, within Gaza,” which would serve economic dividends of peace to Palestinians. “Once Palestinians can see this part of Gaza offers a better life, the population will start drifting from Hamas held to new Gaza,” he said

If Gaza is carved up in two, as Lerman reckons, the international forces may indeed find it easier to deploy in areas where Hamas is absent. However, that is currently not on the table, at least not officially, since the Israeli government continues to demand Hamas’s total disarmament and for it to have no role in Gaza’s future.