Why the UN – not Israel – should oversee peacekeeping and security in Gaza

Israel can’t occupy Gaza forever. The most practical post-ceasefire solution is temporary UN governance of the strip, pending a final political solution

Zhou Bo

Published: 5:30am, 11 Nov 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

The outcome of Israel’s sweeping invasion of Gaza is not hard to tell. Israel’s military strength is overwhelmingly superior to that of Hamas. But Hamas can hardly be wiped “off the face of the Earth”, as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has vowed. The question is, amid mounting civilian deaths, what to do even after a ceasefire?

There is no panacea to what former American president Barack Obama recently described as “century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore”.

As the Israeli military campaign against Hamas entered its second month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Israel will, for an indefinite period … have the overall security responsibility” in Gaza once the fighting is over.

But Israeli troops can ill afford to stay indefinitely in Gaza where, to resentful Palestinians, they are but occupying invaders. Even the White House has told Israel that reoccupying Gaza is “not the right thing to do”.

The Palestinian Authority that has maintained relative cooperation with the Israeli government might be the most suitable candidate for taking over, but it could be reluctant too. A war that destroys Hamas would also seriously discredit the Palestinian Authority.

With the probability of a two-state solution even more remote, how can it convince Palestinians that cooperation with Israel is still necessary?

According to Bloomberg, the US and Israel have discussed three options: the first is to grant temporary oversight of Gaza to countries from the region, backed by troops from the United States, Britain, Germany and France.

The second is a peacekeeping force, modelled on the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) group that operates on and around the Sinai peninsula between Egypt and Israel. The third would be temporary governance of the strip under a UN umbrella.

None of these options looks perfect. On the first option, the White House has ruled out stationing US troops in Gaza. Despite being the largest financial contributor of global peacekeeping, the US has never really sent out large troops for such missions.

Even if it changes its mind, such a multilateral force from countries that have so far supported, albeit not wholeheartedly, Israel’s no-ceasefire determination, simply won’t be trusted by the Palestinians in the first place.

On the second option, the MFO group overseeing peace between Egypt and Israel has proven highly effective and successful. But this is because both countries hold a strong desire for durable and lasting peace.

It is far from certain that any Arab nation, say Egypt or Saudi Arabia, or even a group of Arab countries, would wish to bear the brunt of stabilising a war-torn area engulfed by misery and hatred.

The third option ushers in new light, in spite of inherent problems. Establishing a peacekeeping mission requires the consent of the parties involved. But who are the parties in this conflict? Israel will surely not allow Hamas to be one.

Following the Oslo I Accord in 1993, the Palestinian Authority and Israel conditionally recognised each other’s right to govern specific areas. Can Israel accept the Palestinian Authority as the other party, even if it implies a greater degree of sovereignty and statehood?

03:21

Dozens killed as Gaza’s largest refugee camp hit by Israeli air strike targeting ‘Hamas terrorists’

The other thing is how Israel might trust the UN, with which it has long-troubled relations. Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz labelled UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres a “terror apologist” after Guterres argued that the October 7 attacks by Hamas “did not happen in a vacuum”. And Hamas is likely to see any peacekeeping mission as just another type of occupation and respond with violence.

Still, this option looks the most practical. The UN has seldom succeeded in stopping a war, but its peacekeeping operations have experience with cleaning up the mess. The legitimacy of UN Security Council mandates is second to none. With the consent of the parties – hopefully worked out through diplomacy – the UN Security Council would presumably have no problem in agreeing to establish a mission in one of the world’s most fragile and volatile regions.

The Middle East is the incubator of peacekeeping. The first UN peacekeeping mission started with the Arab-Israel ceasefire in 1948. Today, the UN has more than 10,000 peacekeepers along Israel’s border regions, with operations in Lebanon and Syria.

Both missions monitor the ceasefire between Israel and its two neighbours, from patrolling the “Blue Line” along Lebanon’s southern frontier, to monitoring such areas as Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed from Syria.

An Israeli artillery unit fires during a military drill in the annexed Golan Heights near the border with Lebanon on November 2. Lebanon’s southern border has seen tit-for-tat exchanges, mainly between Israel and Hamas ally Hezbollah, since Hamas militants launched an unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. Photo: AFP

The UN has more than enough troops to deploy. Despite growing tensions and conflicts in recent years, peacekeeping around the globe is shrinking. As a result, there are only 12 missions and about 90,000 personnel, down from the 125,000 UN peacekeepers deployed across 16 missions in 2015.

China, for instance, has 8,000 peacekeepers in the UN’s standby force but only a couple of thousand Chinese peacekeeping troops are currently deployed.

The most useful peacekeepers that could be sent to a would-be Gaza mission would be the UN’s “vanguard brigade” of 4,000 rapidly deployable troops, selected from member states. They can be dispatched within 60 days to troubled spots with protection of civilians as their first priority. Given the huge loss of life in Gaza, one can easily imagine how such peacekeeping troops are badly needed over there.

But however useful peacekeeping may be, it is but an ad hoc measure pending a final political solution. After the October 7 Hamas attacks, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that “tragedy is part of Israeli life”. To end the tragedy, Israel needs to think about how and when the Palestinians can have their own homeland one day.

Senior Colonel Zhou Bo (ret) is a senior fellow of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University and a China Forum expert