The U.S. military is expected to oversee a joint force in Gaza that will initially consist of roughly 200 non-American troops, if and when the ceasefire process reaches that point, according to senior U.S. officials.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. Central Command, will oversee the International Stabilization Force, which will “probably be a bunch of” Qatari, Egyptian, Turkish, and Emirati troops, a senior U.S. official told reporters.
“His role will be to oversee, observe, make sure there are no violations, incursion; everybody’s worried about the other side,” the official said of Cooper. “So much of this is going to be oversight. Embedded within his team of 200 people will be probably a bunch of people from the Egyptian armed forces, who will help the Qatari armed forces, who will help, as well as the Turks, and probably the Emirati.”
This effort will not involve a U.S. presence in Gaza, another U.S. official said, adding that many details regarding the creation of an international stabilization force are still being worked out.
The second official specified that the United States’s role will “really just to help create the joint control center and then integrate all the other security forces that will be going in there to deconflict with IDF, and then to build the right force structure that’s able to handle the missions as they are defined.”
Israel and Hamas agreed on Thursday to an initial ceasefire and hostage exchange, with world leaders hopeful that this will bring an end of the conflict permanently. Hamas agreed to release all 48 remaining hostages in exchange for the release of 250 Palestinians serving life sentences and another 1,700 Palestinians who have been detained since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack.
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the hostages will likely be released on Monday or Tuesday of next week.
There are still details that need to be determined and agreed upon for what will happen once the hostages and prisoners are exchanged.
“We were able to do something that we thought was important, which was to separate the peace deal into two clear phases. One, a hostage release, which also will include a prisoner release of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli penal system. So we were able to separate that, and that became an important thing,” the first official added.
Israeli forces will pull back from certain areas in Gaza, reducing the amount of the enclave under its control. The stabilization force will “basically be able to hopefully replace the IDF,” that official continued.
The U.S. military does not have a presence in Gaza, but it has aided Israeli operations and defense over the course of the last two years while also trying to find alternative ways to get aid into Gaza when Israel was limiting it.
U.S. forces built a temporary pier off Gaza’s coast in the Mediterranean Sea for a couple of months in the summer of 2024 to provide a maritime route for humanitarian aid to reach the besieged enclave. The pier effort largely failed to meet expectations due to multiple disruptions. They also conducted airdrops of aid, in which military aircraft dropped aid into the water right off Gaza’s coast.
American troops also aided in defending Israel during the two massive Iranian aerial barrages in April and October 2024, and the U.S. government has provided millions of dollars in military support to Israel.
