Indonesia Morocco Kosovo offer troops for Gaza plan

A proposed “Gaza plan” is acquiring the most exportable of political products: a multinational force.

Al Jazeera reports that Indonesia, Morocco and Kosovo are among five countries prepared to send troops under a plan for Gaza. The basic pitch is familiar: import security from abroad, attach a mandate to it, and hope the blue-helmet logic—diffuse responsibility, shared risk, and endless meetings—can substitute for local legitimacy.

What Al Jazeera’s reporting makes clear, even in outline, is that the key questions are not about uniforms but about incentives and command. Who pays? Who gives orders? Under what legal authority—UN mandate, bilateral agreements, or an ad hoc coalition? And what exactly are the troops expected to do: protect aid corridors, police ceasefire lines, guard crossings, or govern?

Those details matter because “peacekeeping” is not a neutral technology; it is a bureaucratic compromise. Multinational forces are structurally designed to avoid accountability. When something goes wrong, contributing states blame the mandate, the mandate blames “the parties,” and the parties blame each other. Meanwhile, the force’s real mission often drifts toward self-protection: force preservation becomes the operational objective, and the local population becomes a variable to be managed.

Gaza is an especially hostile environment for this model. Security there is not merely a question of separating combatants; it is inseparable from sovereignty, borders, and who controls the guns. A foreign force that cannot credibly impose rules—or that is perceived as enforcing someone else’s rules—risks becoming another faction, just one with better logistics.

There is also the economic and political supply chain. Troop contributions are rarely pure altruism: they buy diplomatic leverage, military funding, training opportunities, and a seat at the table when reconstruction contracts and political arrangements are negotiated. For smaller states, participation can be a way to convert soldiers into status.

Should be skeptical of the premise that international security bureaucracy can be airlifted into a territory and produce order without ownership-like clarity and consent. Security is not a commodity delivered by committee; it is a set of enforceable rules that people recognize as binding. Without that, “peacekeepers” are often reduced to performing legitimacy—patrolling, posing, writing reports—while the real coercive power remains elsewhere.

Al Jazeera’s list of willing contributors signals momentum. It does not resolve the central problem: a multinational force can spread risk among governments, but it cannot outsource responsibility for political order in Gaza. It can, however, ensure that when it fails, no one in particular is to blame.