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Leaders of a number of key regional countries who met with US President Donald Trump before his announcement of the 20-point ceasefire plan have expressed reservations about the temporary international security force needed to ensure compliance with agreement.

Jordan, the country with the longest border with Israel and Palestine, appears reluctant to send any security force to Gaza at all, and has publicly called for a clear mandate on the plan from the UN Security Council.

For Palestinians, the UN is a much more welcoming venue. Palestinians have been asking that Israel end its occupation since 1967. Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, have often called for a UN or international force. Abbas has even said that the force can also include NATO member states. But the discussion then was to replace the Israeli occupiers in both the West Bank and Gaza.

When Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, met Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s permanent observer to the UN, the encounter represented a reversal from the Israeli and American position negating the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.

Jordan appears reluctant to send any security force at all. 

Daoud Kuttab

Apparently, in coordination with the Israeli government, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the extreme decision to ban an invited Palestinian delegation headed by Abbas from attending the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York.

While Washington has decided to use the UN as an arena to convince countries to join the international force in Gaza, it is clear that the words in the draft resolution appear to have been written in Tel Aviv’s Kirya, the Israeli equivalent of the Pentagon. It seems that the “stabilization force” that is supposed to ensure compliance with the truce could easily get into a shooting match with Palestinian fighters instead of recording ceasefire violations.

What appeared in the first draft submitted by the Trump administration is worrying in many other ways. Not only does it lack any reference to previous international resolutions and fails to give a clear role to the Ramallah-based government, it also gives the US and Israel the right to decide what constitutes acceptable reform by the Palestinian Authority.

The overwhelming majority of members of the Security Council have already recognized the state of Palestine along its 1967 borders, and that includes Gaza in addition to the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Social media has been calling the resolution a new colonialism. 

Daoud Kuttab

Social media has been calling the draft resolution a new colonialism, adding that Trump and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu will be the rulers of Gaza.

Oraib Rantawi, director of Al Quds Center for Political Studies, took a different direction. He appealed to all the countries that recognized Palestine, and specifically the Arab and Islamic countries that had given the US president a green light for his 20-point plan. At a meeting in Istanbul, Arab and Islamic states asked to participate in a stabilization force affirmed that no such step could be taken without an explicit mandate from the Security Council. Rantawi reiterated that those countries “are demanding a clear and fundamental role for both the Security Council and the Palestinian Authority from the outset, ensuring that the “Peace Council’ serves as a monitoring and oversight body, not a colonial trusteeship that perpetuates the separation between the West Bank and Gaza and obstructs the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Rantawi said that those countries bear the responsibility of ensuring that the stabilization force is not used against the Palestinian people. Disarmament must be achieved through "negotiation and agreement, within the framework of organizing weapons under a single Palestinian leadership, a single authority, and a unified national decision,” he argued.

It is too early to tell whether an agreed text will be found that nine members of the council will agree to and that none of the five permanent members will veto.

• Daoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He is the author of “State of Palestine Now: Practical and Logical Arguments for the Best Way to Bring Peace to the Middle East.” X: @daoudkuttab