Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Two visions of the future of Gaza are congealing, in two different power centers. One is the Arab and Muslim foreign ministers who met Monday in Istanbul, including Türkiye, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Tuesday morning that the group rejects any foreign custodianship over Gaza.
He also said that Hamas is prepared to hand over the governance of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian administration. He and the other foreign ministers want a formal United Nations Security Council mandate for any international military force in Gaza, with careful specifications of its role.
Fidan warned that the Palestinian West Bank must not be ethnically cleansed, nor should there be any alteration in the Status Quo of the al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem, the third holiest site for the world’s two billion Muslims.
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Pakistan, Türkiye and Indonesia are thought to be prepared to send peace-keeping troops to Gaza, possibly along with Egypt and Azerbaijan, while the Gulf states would support the effort monetarily. The extreme-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to Turkish troops in Gaza, but Ankara has good relations with US President Donald Trump and he may overrule Tel Aviv’s objections.
Yeni Şafak [New Dawn], which is close to the government of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, reports that Türkiye insists on having military personnel in Gaza, possibly officers who could serve as observers of the ceasefire, which Türkiye accuses Israel of continually violating, or search and rescue teams helping clear away rubble and recover the bodies of the thousands of Palestinians killed in their apartment buildings by the systematic Israeli Air Force bombardment of the past two years. The newspaper says that Türkiye could send peacekeeping troops, but that it is more likely that that role will be undertaken by other countries.
Türkiye is eager to get the international Muslim peacekeepers on the ground as soon as possible in order to forestall Israel from continuing to occupy Gaza and from starting back up its bombardment of the Strip, as it did last week, killing over 100 Palestinians mostly noncombatants.
“Istanbul Conference,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
The vision enunciated at the Istanbul conference, of a Palestinian administration supported by ground troops from major Muslim powers in preparation for a return of Gaza to rule by the Palestine Authority, is anathema to Netanyahu and it isn’t exactly the same as the Trump plan.
Barak Ravid at Axios reports that he has seen a US draft resolution sent to the UN Security Council regarding the international force, which Washington hopes will be on the ground by January.
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The Trump plan involves creating a “Board of Peace,” which he will head up, to which the international troops will report. That sounds like the “foreign tutelage” over Gaza that the Muslim foreign ministers in Istanbul just rejected. The Board of Peace will supervise a technocratic Palestinian administration. That is, Palestinian parties that actually represent Palestinians will be excluded, in favor of credentialed individuals with no grass roots.
The Board of Peace, which will have substantial input from Israel and Egypt, would preside over Gaza for two years and then hand it over to the Palestine Authority, which in the meantime will have had to undertake “reforms.”
Again, Netanyahu and his fellow genocidaires are die-hard opposed to returning Gaza to rule by the Palestine Authority, which is dominated by the Palestine Liberation Organization, because they fear a unified administration of the West Bank and Gaza would form a plausible basis for the emergence of a Palestinian state, which everyone but Israel wants.
The Trump plan sounds a lot like Bush’s Iraq, where the US Department of Defense ran the country for a year, with appointed Iraqi technocrats under a US viceroy and “coalition of the willing” troops on the ground. It didn’t go well.
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