Resistance rejects international Gaza force

On Saturday, 10 January, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas called for an "international presence" to "protect Palestinian civilians" in the Gaza Strip, which has been governed by Hamas since the summer of 2007. "We want the international force to be deployed in Gaza, not on the Egyptian border," he told reporters in Cairo.

Abbas added that he had "no objection" to the deployment of an international force to the PA-controlled West Bank as well as to the Gaza Strip. According to media reports, several countries, including Turkey and a handful of European Union member states, have expressed readiness to contribute troops.

On the same day, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit ruled out deployment of an international force along Egypt's 14-kilometer border with the besieged territory. "International troops will not be on the Egyptian side," Aboul Gheit said at a press conference.

He did not, however, expressly dismiss the notion of an international force inside the Gaza Strip.

The idea has been floated before. Following Hamas's seizure of the strip from the PA in June 2007 (after Hamas won the elections in 2006), Abbas made public calls for an international force to be sent to the territory. "We have insisted on the necessity of deploying an international force in the Gaza Strip to guarantee the delivery of humanitarian aid and to allow citizens to enter and leave freely," Abbas said at the time.

But with the exception of Abbas's United States-backed Fatah party, the idea was quickly dismissed by Palestinian resistance factions as a non-starter. Hamas declared it "will not under any circumstances" allow international forces to enter the Gaza Strip, adding that such forces would be "greeted with artillery shells and missiles."

Cairo, too, ruled out the idea at the time. An international deployment to Gaza would, a diplomatic source said, "have a negative effect on [Palestinian] national unity, on the [Egypt-Gaza] border and on Egyptian national security."

Although Abbas's proposal eventually fizzled out, it found endorsement by Israeli Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party. At the time, Lieberman went so far as to visit several North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states in an effort to garner support for NATO-led Gaza deployment.

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