A European and US-backed UN security council motion to give a planned international stabilisation force robust powers to control security inside Gaza is being prepared, with the strong expectation that Egypt will lead it, diplomats have said.
The US is pressing for the force to have a UN mandate without being a fully fledged UN peacekeeping force and will operate with the kind of powers given to international troops operating in Haiti to combat armed gangs.
Turkey, Indonesia and Azerbaijan are also being billed alongside Egypt as the main troop contributors. Egypt is still being consulted on whether the force should be a full UN-led operation.
It is not expected that European or British troops will be involved, but Britain has sent advisers to a small cell being operated by the US inside Israel that is working on implementing the second phase of the 20-point plan developed by Donald Trump, the US president.
The UK is stressing that the ultimate aim is a Palestinian state , which must be seen eventually as a single entity including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The UK has already been training a Palestinian police force contingent but the international force will be given lead responsibility under the proposal.
If the force proves effective, Israel will withdraw further. Israel has however been insisting it will retain a large Israeli controlled buffer zone to protect itself from fresh Hamas attacks.
British diplomats admit that the issue of decommissioning Hamas weapons will be the most difficult and it is contributing ideas from the process in Northern Ireland, where IRA and Protestant-controlled weapons were put beyond use including through an independent verification body.
It is probable that Hamas will only decommission weapons to a Palestinian-led body to ensure connotations of surrender are minimised, but third parties could be used to verify this for Israel. The process is very likely to start with Hamas’s heavy weaponry and missile launchers, with the much more fraught issue of personal weapons owned by Hamas brigades deferred.
The UK seems to be fully behind the former UK prime minister Tony Blair taking a place on a board – referred to as the board of peace in Trump’s plan – intended to oversee the work of a 15-strong committee of Palestinian technocrats.
Blair, accused of destabilising the Middle East by backing the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, has won influential support from the current Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani.
Speaking to CNBC, the Iraqi leader said: “Tony Blair is a person acceptable to the Iraqis and a friend, having contributed to the decision to go to war with President Bush at the time and to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“He is a great friend of the Iraqis and visits us often and I also hold meetings with him. We certainly wish him success in this mission and we will support him.”
Blair’s place on the board, to be chaired by Trump, is expected to be clarified by the second week of November, when Egypt will host a major Gaza reconstruction conference in Cairo trying to bring together a pool of international donors and private sector finance. The UK believes the scale of the required funds in excess of $67bn (£50bn) is so vast that private finance will have to be used as well as Gulf donors.
Officials admit that the precise relationship between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the board of peace needs to be clarified.
Next Wednesday it is expected that the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague will find against Israel for ending all cooperation with UN aid agencies including the main Palestinian agency, Unrwa.
The request for an ICJ advisory opinion initially brought by Norway and backed by a UN security council resolution will give the ICJ judges an opportunity once again to clarify that Israel as an occupying force had a legal duty to provide aid to the people of Gaza, and it has utterly failed to comply with that duty.
The PA foreign minister, Varsen Aghabekian, said the PA had learned from its mistakes and was now a state in the making. Speaking to a conference in Naples organised by IPSI the Italian thinktank, she said one of the most important changes the PA was undertaking involved the school curriculum.
But she said: “If we develop that curriculum to the best standards of the world but children that are taught that curriculum continue to live under dire occupation will that give them a narrative of peace? No. What will bring them a narrative of peace, and internalise it, is when children do not experience, on a daily basis, checkpoints, a humiliation, trees being uprooted, the farms being burned and the fathers killed.”
