Deploy NATO troops to the Gaza border

Lest the world forget, a war is still raging in Gaza. Among the many obstacles to even a modest cease-fire, there is the Philadelphi corridor.

Less than nine miles long and roughly as wide as a football field, it occupies a crucial border location — including the Rafah crossing — between Egypt and Gaza. Egypt patrolled its side of the border after the 1979 peace agreement, then the Palestinian Authority took over control when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. But the PA was itself driven out by Hamas in 2007.

Since then, the Rafah crossing has been a central route for food, medicines and other goods for the people of Gaza — but also the main thoroughfare through which weapons, rockets and tunnel-building materials flowed. For nearly two decades, Hamas used this route to bring weapons into Gaza, hide them in a maze of tunnels and launch attacks against Israel.

The Netanyahu government wants to avoid a return to this vulnerability before any cease-fire. For a halt in fighting to be anything more than just a brief pause while Hamas re-arms and rebuilds its tunnels, more will be needed than just purposeful assurances.

Having the Israeli military in charge of this border — the Israeli government’s preference — might accomplish such a goal, but its presence guarantees that the fighting will continue, as will the casualties. Egypt is also hostile to that idea, but it has no interest in taking up positions inside Gaza, even if Israel were to agree to such a thing.

Who, then, could take up this task? An Arab force? The U.N.? Even if such a group were willing and capable, it would be a cumbersome vehicle inspiring little trust.

But NATO could do it. A combined force drawn from willing NATO countries could put the means and muscle on the ground to secure the border and the crossing.

No formal permissions would be needed, as Gaza is hardly sovereign and the corridor is in neither Egyptian nor Israeli territory. But Israeli and Egyptian consent would be necessary and, with the proper components, could offer a viable security mechanism.

A sealed border would not ensure Middle East peace and is certainly not the only sticking point in the indirect cease-fire negotiations. But implementing such a force would be a major step toward stopping the fighting and making it difficult to start again.

The goal of this force would not be political. The nations constituting the border patrol, including the U.S., would endorse neither Israel’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas nor the latter’s goal of replacing the Jewish State. But the force would satisfy Hamas’s demand for an Israeli withdrawal and Israel’s need for a secure perimeter. Just by making this offer, NATO would give the adversaries something they say they want and test their commitment to a broader cease-fire.

Taking a step in this direction now might also give Hamas’s allies, such as Hezbollah, a way to declare one of their goals, a cease-fire, fulfilled and thus avoid the wider warfare and destruction already erupting in Lebanon. Without any cease-fire at all, as Dana Stroul put it in a recent assessment, “The conditions are set for an ongoing [Israeli] presence in Gaza, which…will prevent Hezbollah from standing down.”

More urgently and directly, a NATO-based perimeter would allow the supply of aid to the beleaguered people of Gaza, whose fate has only worsened as new fighting began in the north.

The task would be dangerous. A NATO force could become a target, as it has in other such operations. A NATO border patrol in Philadelphi would have to be active and armed. But its purposes would be limited and achievable: to allow vital supplies to flow to the people of Gaza; to deny Hamas the means to rearm; and to remove at least one sector from direct, murderous confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Gazans. If even partially successful in preventing the flow of arms, it could mitigate the need for another Israeli assault in Gaza.

There is ample precedent right in the region. The first separation agreements between Egyptian and Israeli forces negotiated by Henry Kissinger in 1974 were monitored by the U.S. while the U.N. Emergency Force was placed between the armies. The U.S. role was crucial in ending fighting in this case and between Israel and Syria the same year. It can be so again.

NATO has often operated “out of area,” including in both advisory and military roles in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Balkans. NATO forces were essential to ending fighting in Bosnia in 1995 and protecting Kosovar Albanians in 1999.

Creating and putting such a force in place would be complicated. The commitment may be open ended — the NATO-based Kosovo Force is still there. And it would be politically fraught, especially in an election year. The U.S. would have to commit itself to continuing to support this action regardless of the election results.

But this is well within NATO’s capabilities and, as it has done elsewhere, could be augmented with participating partners. Such a perimeter would allow the world’s powerful actors to do something beyond threats, sanctions and exhortation. It offers a means to mitigate the dangers and provide a first step away from slaughter in two volatile regions.

The current leaders in Israel and Gaza might hate this idea, with alternate and maximal goals unfulfilled. But to the people on all sides whose children are dying, it could be a literal life saver. 

Ronald H. Linden is a retired professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as director of Russian and East European Studies and director of European Studies. From 1989 to 1991, he served as director of research for Radio Free Europe.