According to President Trump’s plan, on which the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas is based, a international stabilization forcemade up mainly of troops from Arab and Muslim countries, will be sent to Gaza as the Israeli army withdraws from the enclave.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this Sunday that he has veto power over the members of the international force that his North American ally is trying to form to protect the Gaza Strip in the post-war period.
According to President Donald Trump’s plan, on which the ceasefire agreement between Israel and the radical Palestinian movement Hamas is based, a international stabilization forcemade up mainly of troops from Arab and Muslim countries, will be sent to Gaza as the Israeli army withdraws from the enclave.
“We make (…) clear, in relation to international forces, that Israel will decide which forces are unacceptable to us“, declared Netanyahu, who opposed the sending of forces from Türkiye, a country with close ties to Hamas.
“We are an independent state”, he insisted to his ministers. “Our security policy is in our hands.”
On Friday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said members of the international force “should be people or countries that Israel feels comfortable with”, after a Turkish Defense Ministry source reported discussions about Turkish participation.
The first phase of the ceasefire agreement, which came into force on October 10, provides, in addition to the ceasefire, the release of all hostages, living and dead, the partial withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza and the distribution by the United Nations of humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Hamas released all 20 hostages alive on October 13, but So far, only 15 of the 28 bodies have been handed overciting difficulties in finding remains in the territory devastated by the Israeli retaliatory offensive.
This Sunday, before dawn, Egyptian vehicles and trucks transporting heavy construction equipment They entered Gaza and headed to Al-Zawayda (center), where they will be based.
Shosh Bedrosian, spokesman for Netanyahu’s office, confirmed that an Egyptian technical team was “authorized to go beyond the yellow line”, which demarcates the Israeli-controlled area of Gaza, “to search for the [corpos dos] hostages.”
“We will not give the (Israeli) occupation an excuse to resume the war. New areas will be accessible to search for some of the bodies” of hostages, declared Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya.
In addition to deploying a multinational force, subsequent phases of Trump’s plan include continuation of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the disarmament of Hamas and the reconstruction of the territoryamong others.
Hamas, which seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, has so far refused to consider disarmament, although Netanyahu wants to expel it from the territory.
On Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance said international force must be at the forefront of ensuring Hamas’s disarmament.
“Gaza will be demilitarized” and this “will be done in the easiest or hardest way”, reiterated Bedrosian, reaffirming that Israel “will exercise total control over the security of Gaza”.
