From the Liveblog of
Friday, July 10, 2026
Report: US struggling to deploy 20 foreign Gaza peacekeepers after pledging 20,000
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After laying out a plan for the deployment of 20,000 international peacekeepers to secure postwar Gaza, the US is now struggling to deploy a small delegation of just 10 to 20 soldiers, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The delegation of Moroccan soldiers was supposed to deploy in June, but only to a base in southern Israel, rather than in Gaza, WSJ reports, citing a US military official and other people familiar with the plans.
Now, the timeline for their deployment to Israel has been muddied and extended to sometime in the next few months, in the latest demonstration of how the US-controlled Board of Peace has stalled in its efforts to advance the reconstruction of Gaza.
US officials in December had claimed that the ISF would begin deploying in early 2026 — another prediction that didn’t pan out as attention shifted to the US-Israeli war in Iran.
During that war, one of the five countries that had pledged to contribute troops to the ISF, Indonesia, announced that it was putting the offer on hold due to regional instability.
Four other countries — Albania, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and Morocco — are still committed to sending troops. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has become increasingly unwilling to cooperate with the Board of Peace as October elections in Israel approach, and has dragged its feet in signing off on the agreements necessary for establishing legal guardrails around foreign military personnel stationed abroad.
ISF troops will be based at two sites — a nearly completed logistics hub on the Israeli side of the Kerem Shalom Border Crossing and a base inside Gaza, which hasn’t been built yet, WSJ says. The two sites are meant to accommodate about 5,500 ISF personnel.
The small Moroccan delegation will first be based at the hub inside Israel, and initially be tasked with expeditionary-style operations inside Gaza, like route reconnaissance, WSJ says.
The Board of Peace also wants the first batch of ISF troops to help secure a pilot humanitarian zone it plans to build on the ruins of the southern Gaza city of Rafah. However, 10 to 20 soldiers would be a wildly insufficient number for that mission, given that the Emirati-funded enclave is meant to serve tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Construction on the compound hasn’t even begun, with a crew of Gaza land surveyors blocked from reaching the area by Hamas operatives at a checkpoint
The Times of Israel Community.