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A stunning, rapid military push by Yemen’s Houthi movement along the country’s Red Sea coastline has placed the strategically vital Bab el-Mandeb Strait within the group’s full control, shifting regional power dynamics and strengthening Iran’s strategic leverage against the United States, regional and security experts told Middle East Eye in a new analysis of the battlefield shifts.

“The Houthis have pulled off a decisive military victory that brings them within one major step of controlling the entire Bab el-Mandeb waterway,” Corey Ranslem, chief executive officer of maritime security firm Dryad Global, explained to Middle East Eye. Ranslem added that the Houthis will face far fewer barriers to exerting influence over Bab el-Mandeb than Iran does in the Strait of Hormuz, because the U.S. maintains no substantial, permanent military presence in the Bab el-Mandeb area to counter their moves.

The breakthrough came after days of intense combat across the narrow Tihama coastal plain, where Houthi forces defeated Saudi-aligned Yemeni troops on Thursday and seized the historic, strategically critical Red Sea port of Mocha. Regional Arab media outlets confirmed that Houthi gains expanded across the region through the rest of the day: the group has already deployed military personnel to the Hanish Islands, located in the central Red Sea opposite Eritrea, and continues to push south toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait itself and the key island of Perim.

The sweeping Houthi advance has also exposed deep coordination rifts within the Saudi-backed anti-Houthi coalition operating in Yemen. In a surprising development, Houthi troops moving across open, exposed coastal terrain encountered almost no significant air resistance from Saudi Arabia or its Yemeni allied factions.

Mocha was previously held by the National Resistance Forces (NRF), a well-armed anti-Houthi faction led by Tarek Saleh, nephew of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed by the Houthis a decade ago, just months after he split from a short-lived alliance with the movement. The NRF was long backed by the United Arab Emirates, but the group shifted its formal allegiance to Saudi Arabia earlier this year, after the UAE announced its full military withdrawal from Yemen. Saudi Arabia subsequently took over responsibility for funding and supporting UAE-aligned armed groups in the country.

Rifts between the two leading Gulf coalition partners have widened in recent months, with disagreements over the war in Sudan, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and Yemeni separatist movements stalling cooperation. The Houthi offensive is unfolding against ongoing, stalled talks between Saudi Arabia and the UAE over a potential UAE return to Yemen to cover military operational costs, a Western diplomat confirmed to Middle East Eye, noting the negotiations remain at an impasse.

The latest Houthi gains build on months of escalating tensions between the movement and Saudi Arabia. Over the past year, the Houthis have launched repeated drone and missile strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure and commercial shipping, while Saudi-led coalition forces have carried out retaliatory air strikes on Houthi positions. Saudi-backed Yemeni forces also attempted their own counter-offensive to retake the Houthi-held major port of Hodeida earlier this year, which failed to gain meaningful ground.

Arab and Western officials tracking the resurgence of fighting told Middle East Eye the Houthi offensive—the largest large-scale military operation launched since a 2022 ceasefire collapsed—stems from two core strategic motivations. First, establishing full military control along the Bab el-Mandeb coastline will allow the Houthis to enforce a blockade against Saudi Arabia with far greater accuracy, while also asserting authority over all international shipping passing through the chokepoint.

Before the current Yemeni civil war, roughly 12% of global seaborne oil trade already transited the Red Sea. The waterway’s strategic importance grew dramatically after Iran increased its control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, pushing Saudi Arabia to shift a larger share of its oil exports through the Red Sea route. Diplomats note the Houthis have directly drawn inspiration from Iran’s model of charging tolls for commercial shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and aim to replicate that system in Bab el-Mandeb.

“The Houthis essentially want to collect their own tolls on Red Sea shipping, and Saudi Arabia has been completely firm that it will never accept paying a Houthi toll,” a diplomat based in Riyadh explained.

The Houthi movement has also spent months rebuilding its military capacity after sustaining heavy losses during extensive U.S. air strikes carried out between January and May 2025. As Middle East Eye exclusively reported in July, military experts specializing in drone and missile technology from Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Iraq have already been deployed to Yemen to support the Houthis, and Iran has continued to supply the group with advanced military equipment.

Beyond the Houthis’ own strategic goals, the capture of the Red Sea coastline also advances Iran’s regional agenda amid escalating tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, where both U.S. and Iranian forces have targeted commercial shipping in recent months.

“This move aligns completely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ long-term goal of controlling both major maritime trade chokepoints surrounding the Arabian Peninsula,” said Ibrahim Jalal, a Yemeni researcher and regional policy adviser. Jalal added that the advance also serves the Houthis’ own core priority of extracting economic concessions from Saudi Arabia.

“The Houthis now control the highest mountain peaks overlooking the entire Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which makes targeting and surveillance of passing shipping far easier,” Jalal noted. “They will also be able to strike targets in the Gulf of Aden with much greater ease than before.”

Decades after the 9/11 attacks launched the United States’ global “war on terror”, newly declassified court filings and confirmed evidence have pulled back the curtain on one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most secretive overseas black sites: a downtown Bucharest detention facility where scores of detainees were held and systematically tortured between 2003 and 2005. Among the men held at the site, codenamed Detention Site Black, is Ammar al-Baluchi, nephew of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose firsthand account of cruelty paints a damning portrait of life inside the secret prison.

Baluchi, who was detained at the facility for nearly two years, says the most searing memory of his captivity is the unrelenting cold. Held nearly naked in cells illuminated 24 hours a day by harsh fluorescent bulbs, he described his imprisonment as “living inside a refrigerator”. Court documents detail a consistent pattern of abuse at the site: prolonged solitary confinement under constant artificial light, deliberate sleep deprivation that sometimes kept detainees shackled in a standing position for days on end, repeated dousing with ice-cold water, and degrading forced procedures that interrogators labeled with euphemisms such as “attention grasps” and “facial holds”. Earlier this year, Baluchi’s legal team released the first ever publicly circulated photograph of a CIA black site detainee: an image of Baluchi stripped naked and photographed by intelligence personnel, one of tens of thousands of similar images secretly held by the U.S. government.

More than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. to launch deadly invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that have killed at least 940,000 people directly, a U.S. military judge has finally scheduled a long-delayed trial for Baluchi and four other co-defendants in the 9/11 case. Proceedings are set to open on June 5, 2028, more than a decade after the case was first brought. The decades-long delay stems from a core legal dispute: whether confessions and statements coerced through torture at CIA black sites before the detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay can be used as admissible evidence in court. In a landmark 2025 ruling, a Guantanamo military judge found that statements Baluchi gave to the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, ruling they were permanently tainted by the torture and cruel, inhuman treatment he endured in CIA custody, including at the Bucharest site. The judge ruled that even the slightly improved conditions of detention at Guantanamo could not erase the “lingering taint” of abuse he suffered in the black site network.

The Bucharest black site was part of a sprawling network of secret CIA prisons spread across three continents in the years after 9/11, part of the agency’s controversial rendition, detention and interrogation program that was formally shut down by the Obama administration in 2009. Declassified records and independent research from the Rendition Project, an NGO that has spent years tracking the CIA’s secret detention network, reveal that Romanian senior state officials agreed to host the site as a goodwill gesture ahead of Romania’s 2004 accession to NATO, in exchange for a total payment of at least $8 million plus additional millions in ongoing funding.

The agreement to build the site was finalized in mid-October 2002, and the first group of five detainees arrived at the facility in autumn 2003. Former Romanian president Ion Iliescu confirmed the broad outlines of the deal in a 2015 interview, acknowledging that U.S. allies requested a site for detention operations “around the turn of the year 2002 and 2003”, which he approved in principle without asking for details. “We did not interfere with the activities of the USA on this site,” Iliescu said, framing the decision as “a gesture of courtesy ahead of our accession to Nato”. The deal was handled by then-national security advisor Ioan Talpes, who admitted in a 2014 interview that he personally approved the lease of a government-owned building to the CIA, and that Romanian officials deliberately chose not to investigate what the agency was doing at the site in order to prove Romania’s reliability to Washington.

Independent investigators have confirmed that top Romanian officials, including former president Traian Basescu, who took office in 2004, were fully aware of the site’s existence and purpose. A 2019 Rendition Project report added a previously undisclosed detail: after September 2004, senior U.S. diplomats and CIA officials formally briefed Romanian authorities on the full scope of the program, including clear descriptions of the torture techniques used on detainees. “It’s definitively the case – the allegations of torture, the money, the people who were held there – it’s definitively the case that that’s Romania in the court files,” said Crofton Black, a former Rendition Project investigator who spent nearly a decade tracing the black site network through flight logs and declassified documents. Black told reporters that Romania made the deliberate choice to host the site because it aligned with the country’s geopolitical goals, and officials believed the U.S. would shield them from accountability.

Unlike black sites in Poland and Lithuania that were built in remote, isolated areas, Detention Site Black was located in central Bucharest, in a government building housing the National Registry Office for Classified Information (Orniss) on a quiet residential street in northern Bucharest, according to a 2011 joint investigation by the Associated Press and ARD Panorama. Orniss has “categorically denied” any connection to the prison. Despite disputes over the exact location, overlapping court testimonies from multiple detainees confirm consistent details of the facility’s harsh conditions: six prefabricated, white-painted cells tiled with impact-resistant glass, mounted on springs designed to keep detainees constantly off-balance and disoriented, with unbroken fluorescent lighting that gave the site the unofficial nickname “Bright Light”.

Another high-profile detainee held at Detention Site Black is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the accused mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Nashiri was held at the Bucharest site between April 2004 and November 2005, and his case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which issued a landmark 2018 ruling that found Romania had violated international human rights law by enabling the CIA’s torture program. The court confirmed Nashiri endured “extremely harsh” conditions including permanent blindfolding, total solitary confinement, constant exposure to loud noise and unbroken lighting, permanent leg shackles during movement, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, physical assault, and forced rectal feeding.

A 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed what independent investigators have long alleged: the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program never produced unique, life-saving intelligence that could not have been obtained through legal interrogation methods. The report found that the CIA held at least 119 detainees across the black site network, 39 of whom were subjected to the brutal unauthorized interrogation techniques, and that the agency deliberately misled Congress and the public about the program’s brutality. To date, almost no U.S. or foreign officials have faced criminal accountability for the abuses.

For more than two decades, successive Romanian governments have officially denied any involvement in hosting the black site. When contacted by Middle East Eye for this report, the Romanian foreign intelligence service said the matter had already been fully investigated by national and international judicial bodies and declined further comment. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice and former president Basescu did not respond to requests for comment, while the domestic intelligence service SRI said it lacked legal standing to address public claims about the site.

Despite Romania’s official denial, the 2018 European Court of Human Rights ruling formally confirmed that the country violated Nashiri’s human rights by enabling his torture and failing to launch a credible investigation into the abuses. A domestic criminal investigation into the allegations, opened in 2012 after a complaint from Nashiri’s legal team, was deliberately stalled for years, and by 2016 the statute of limitations for all alleged crimes had expired, with no suspects ever formally identified. The case was officially closed in March 2021, with prosecutors labeling the perpetrator “unknown” despite access to international evidence sharing. In 2021, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers expressed “profound regret” that Romania had failed to use all available means to investigate and establish the full facts of the case, as required by the Strasbourg court ruling.

Ben Keith, a British barrister who represents Baluchi outside the U.S., said senior Romanian officials intentionally enabled the CIA’s torture program. “We know from the ruling in al-Nashiri the Romanians knew about it; they might have not known exactly what was happening, but they facilitated the CIA to create a black site to torture these men,” Keith said. “Our contention is that Romania not only facilitated the CIA black site but knew they were being used to torture individuals.”

With the 9/11 trial now scheduled for 2028, the role of Romania and other host countries in the CIA’s black site network, and the torture inflicted at Detention Site Black, will take center stage in the legal proceedings. For independent investigators, Romania’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge its role despite overwhelming evidence is indefensible. “There’s been years of compelling evidence that Romania hosted a black site, and the more the evidence has grown, the government continued to deny it was involved,” Black said. “It’s ridiculous, it’s nonsense.”

Over the past weekend, two leading U.S. news outlets, The New York Times and The Washington Post, published details from a confidential evidence dossier that accuses Sudan’s ruling Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) of developing and deploying chemical weapons amid its ongoing two-year civil conflict with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. According to initial reports, the dossier was provided to media by an unnamed Middle Eastern intelligence agency, and it comprises more than 150 pages of materials, including visual evidence, intercepted communications between senior SAF officers, bomb design blueprints, audio recordings, and thousands of text messages pulled directly from the mobile devices of top military commanders. Multiple independent sources speaking to Middle East Eye (MEE) have since confirmed that the intelligence agency in question is Israel’s Mossad, and that the document shared with major U.S. media matches nearly identically a dossier Israel handed over to the U.S. government ahead of Washington’s January 2025 sanctions on SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

The dossier outlines that the SAF launched a six-month secret chemical weapons program in 2024, led by a covert military unit within the force, amid a worsening battlefield situation that saw the RSF seize control of most of Sudan’s capital Khartoum by mid-year. According to the intercepted communications laid out in the document, senior SAF General Tariq Hussain, identified as the head of the initiative, proposed repurposed chlorine gas as a low-cost, accessible weapon to gain a tactical edge in battle for the capital. The dossier claims that from July 2024, a hidden facility assembled prototype chlorine bombs, using repurposed civilian barbecue canisters and liquefied gas tanks, with initial testing conducted in remote desert regions of Sudan. Unlike internationally banned chemical warfare agents such as sarin, chlorine is not classified as a controlled substance under global non-proliferation frameworks. The documents also note that 20 large chlorine cylinders were imported into Sudan from Egypt, a known backer of the SAF throughout the civil war.

A former senior U.S. official familiar with the dossier described the large-scale interception of officer communications as a striking demonstration of the capabilities of Pegasus, the controversial Israeli spyware developed by NSO Group that enables full remote infiltration of smartphone devices. A senior anonymous Sudanese security analyst told MEE that while it was widely understood that Israel maintained strategic intelligence interests in Sudan, the scale, depth and duration of the surveillance operation detailed in the dossier reveals a far deeper level of Israeli engagement in the country than previously acknowledged publicly. Both the Israeli government and foreign ministry have been contacted by MEE for comment on the origins of the dossier, but no response has been issued as of publication. The Sudanese army-backed national government has issued a full, vehement denial of all chemical weapons allegations.

Sudan’s ongoing civil war erupted in April 2023 following a bitter power split between the SAF, led by Burhan, and the RSF, a former state-aligned paramilitary group commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti. The two factions had previously joined forces to carry out a 2021 coup that ousted the civilian interim government established after the 2019 revolution that toppled longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir, but competing claims to power and divergent networks of financial and military influence ultimately pushed the country into full-scale conflict. The RSF has received extensive backing from the United Arab Emirates, Israel’s closest regional ally, while Egypt and most recently a coalition of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have publicly supported the SAF.

The dossier notes that internal SAF communications reveal debate among top leadership over whether to move forward with the chlorine bomb program: while senior officials formally agreed to abandon the project, a small clique of officers continued development in secret, according to a former U.S. official. In September 2024, the RSF issued a public statement accusing the SAF of launching toxic missile strikes on the strategic al-Jaili oil refinery north of Khartoum, which was under RSF control at the time. A subsequent intercepted message from General Hussain referenced that “they drank the gas,” referencing RSF fighters being exposed to chlorine during the attack. However, the dossier contains no confirmed records of fatalities from the attack, no other verified instances of chlorine bombs being deployed in combat, and no medical evidence or victim testimony to corroborate the use of chemical weapons.

In an official response to MEE, the Sudanese government emphasized that it is a signatory state to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and has remained fully compliant with all convention requirements, including commitments to forgo the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. The government added that all chlorine supplies within Sudan’s borders are exclusively earmarked for civilian uses including water purification, industrial production and energy generation, and that the country is willing to open its facilities to inspection by any competent international verification body. It also noted that after the allegations first emerged, Sudan implemented a series of cooperative measures in coordination with the United States, but that Washington has never produced concrete evidence to back up the claims. It should be noted that the RSF itself has been formally accused by both the United Nations and United States of perpetrating genocide against civilian populations in the Darfur region, with eyewitness accounts documenting widespread mass executions, sexual violence and looting carried out by RSF fighters.

The revelation that the evidence dossier originated from Israeli intelligence has sparked new questions about Israel’s covert alignment in Sudan’s civil war, confirming reporting by multiple independent sources that Israel has shifted its support to the RSF, whose primary patron is the UAE. Israeli officials have previously claimed that Israel maintains neutral relations with multiple factions in Sudan, but regional analysts point to a long-building relationship between Israel and Hemedti that deepened starting in 2021. Sudan first moved toward normalizing relations with Israel after the 2019 overthrow of al-Bashir, with Burhan meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2020 and signing the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords that same year, though normalization has never been finalized. Ahead of the 2023 outbreak of war, then-Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen held a high-profile meeting with Burhan to finalize the normalization deal, but the war derailed those plans. Throughout the conflict, Hemedti has maintained close ties to Israeli intelligence, while the UAE has continued its backing of the RSF – support that Abu Dhabi continues to deny despite mounting evidence from the UN and independent investigators.

Recent reporting from Africa Intelligence revealed that two of Hemedti’s brothers made secret trips to Tel Aviv in May 2025 and again earlier this year to hold meetings with senior Israeli intelligence and foreign ministry officials. One regional analyst noted that the timed release of the chemical weapons dossier closely follows the recent signing of the Mecca Agreement, a defense pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan that explicitly reaffirms the bloc’s support for the SAF. The release of the dossier, the analyst argued, represents a show of influence from the Abraham Accords bloc in response to the pro-SAF Mecca Agreement, with the leaked intelligence successfully pushing the U.S. to impose sanctions on Burhan and the SAF leadership. As one former U.S. official put it, “The intelligence they shared with Washington succeeded in getting Burhan and the SAF sanctioned,” adding that the strategic alliance between Israel and the UAE has only deepened amid the Sudan conflict.

Before the first light of dawn broke over southern Lebanon on September 3, Saleh, a local farmer who has refused to abandon his land and home despite escalating cross-border tensions, stepped outside to begin harvesting his fig crop in the border village of Halta. It took only a moment for him to recognize the danger: bright lights illuminated the yard of a neighboring home, a property that had been empty since the most recent round of open conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

The lights belonged to an Israeli infantry unit conducting house-to-house searches across the small village, which sits just kilometers from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The soldiers contacted three Halta residents by mobile phone, ordering them to exit their homes and surrender immediately. After hours of on-site interrogation, the unit detained all three men, among them Hatem Abdel-Aal, a sitting member of Halta’s municipal council. Abdel-Aal was eventually released and returned to the village around midnight, following instructions from soldiers to walk to the designated handover point without any vehicle.

“He couldn’t refuse. They told him exactly what to do, and he followed,” Saleh, whose name has been changed for personal security, told Middle East Eye in an on-site interview. During the entire raid, military loudspeakers blared warnings ordering all other villagers to remain locked inside their homes, while Israeli artillery repeatedly fired on the forested hills rising above Halta. “This is their standard practice everywhere they operate here,” Saleh explained. “They fire artillery to warn locals not to approach, to keep us locked in our homes. I’ve stayed here through every round of fighting because if I leave, I know I’ll lose everything I’ve built – my home, my land. We’ve learned to live with these patterns.”

Halta, a small Sunni community of roughly 350 people located on the outskirts of Kfarchouba, has escaped the total widespread destruction that gutted most majority-Shia border towns caught in the crossfire of the 2023-2024 Israel-Hezbollah war. But the village has been no stranger to repeated Israeli cross-border incursions and enforced detentions of local civilians.

This is not an isolated incident. Over the past three years, Israeli forces have repeatedly abducted Lebanese civilian residents during cross-border military operations, with the Israeli government framing the detentions as legal captures of enemy combatants. While no official government tally of detained Lebanese exists from the two most recent conflicts between the two states, a local committee tracking detainee cases has compiled a public list of 35 people held by Israel – including at least 12 members of Hezbollah and 16 confirmed civilians.

Just hours after the Halta raid, the Israeli government announced it would release five detainees, two of whom were Syrian nationals, after concluding the group had no links to Hezbollah. The fate of Lebanese citizens held in Israeli detention has long been a core sticking point in US-mediated negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, but little to no progress has been made on the issue, as larger disputes remain deadlocked. Most notably, Israel has yet to withdraw its forces from the contested “pilot zones” established under a 2024 framework agreement that was meant to allow the Lebanese army to fully take control of the southern border area.

Earlier the same week, US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a push to break the months-long negotiation impasse and address key Lebanese demands. The subsequent small-scale release of detainees was quickly praised by Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam as a tangible success from Issa’s diplomatic outreach. But the Halta raid, which resulted in new detentions just as the release was being announced, has undercut that narrative.

The incident echoes a similar abduction in May, when Israeli soldiers seized three farmers from the Atiyyeh family as they worked their land near Kfarchouba. More than four months later, the fate of the three men remains unknown. Local municipal officials have repeatedly attempted to secure information on their whereabouts through the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), but all requests have gone unanswered.

“They have no connections to any armed group, no political affiliations at all. They are just working laborers, trying to earn a living to feed their families,” explained Lubna Salha, a member of Kfarchouba’s municipal council.

Regional analysts argue that Israel’s recent partial release of detainees is little more than a symbolic gesture, crafted to ease domestic pressure on the Lebanese government, which has faced widespread public criticism for failing to deliver meaningful results from the US-brokered talks. “Israel gave a little with one hand, and took more with the other,” explained Johny Mounayer, a Beirut-based political analyst. “They abducted new civilians from areas like Halta, while also asserting operational control over the Ali al-Taher ridge. In practical terms, they have given Lebanon nothing of substance.”

The Ali al-Taher ridge, a strategic high point that overlooks the major southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh on the edge of Israel’s self-declared border buffer zone, has been one of the most active flashpoints for cross-border clashes in recent months. Israel claims Hezbollah has built a command center and a network of attack tunnels under the ridge, claims Hezbollah has disputed.

Michael Young, senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center, added that the detainee release also serves as a diplomatic goodwill gesture to Washington, which has struggled to keep the faltering Israeli-Lebanese negotiations on track. “There are clear signs this move was done as a favor to the Americans,” Young noted. “A lot of Israeli actions in this process aren’t aimed at Lebanon at all – they’re aimed at the mediator.”

Late last week, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun released a public statement expressing gratitude to the Trump administration for its role in facilitating the detainee release. Local Lebanese media outlets have reported that the next round of formal negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese delegations is scheduled to take place on September 15 and 16. But for residents of border villages like Halta, every additional day of deadlock brings new uncertainty and danger.

From his home in Halta, Saleh describes a daily reality of occupation: “We sit locked in our houses, and Israeli flags fly on the hills and surrounding villages all around us. We are surrounded on every side.”

On Monday, following Israel’s formal approval, Kosovo officially became the latest member of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s divisive Board of Peace and its accompanying International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza, a move that has ignited sharp debate over geopolitics, human rights, and legal accountability. The signing ceremony, which saw ISF commander Major General Jasper Jeffers and Kosovo Security Force chief Lieutenant General Bashkim Jashari formalize the accession on September 7, 2026, was framed by the Board of Peace as a historic milestone. In a public statement posted to X, the organization emphasized the move demonstrates Kosovo’s unwavering commitment to the ISF mission and alignment with the core strategic goals laid out in Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan.

The Board of Peace also revealed that Kosovo deployed military personnel to the region as early as this past spring, months before the official signing, a deployment that was never disclosed to the public ahead of the announcement. According to the statement, Kosovar troops have already taken on leading roles in logistics planning and civil affairs coordination, in addition to carrying out unexploded ordnance clearance operations on the ground in Gaza.

The decision has proven deeply divisive within Kosovo, a majority-Muslim nation where widespread public sympathy for Palestinians amid the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza has already spurred large-scale pro-Palestine protests across the country. Despite this widespread public opposition, Kosovo’s ruling political leadership has aligned itself with the Trump administration’s pro-Israel demands, a choice that analysts attribute to a mix of ideological alignment and geopolitical pressure.

In comments made back in March, Kosovo’s left-leaning Prime Minister Albin Kurti defended his government’s participation, drawing a parallel to the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. “We are ready to participate and help the people of Gaza, because we ourselves have been and are beneficiaries of international forces since 1999,” Kurti said. That 1999 intervention, led by U.S. forces, involved two and a half months of airstrikes against Serbia to halt the ethnic cleansing campaign targeting Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population. While Kurti’s framing is designed to win over a domestic audience that broadly condemns the violence in Gaza, conflict experts say the comparison is deeply flawed.

Brunilda Pali, assistant professor of conflict dynamics and resolution at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Political Science, called the parallel fundamentally unconvincing in an interview with Middle East Eye. “The international intervention in Kosovo followed a genocidal war in which the international community had identified a grave humanitarian catastrophe,” Pali explained. “Gaza presents a fundamentally different problem,” she added, noting that “as a main supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the U.S. is not at all credible as a peacekeeper.”

This contrast is underscored by ongoing international legal proceedings against Israel: much like Serbia faced global scrutiny for its actions in Kosovo, Israel is currently facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over its military campaign in Gaza. In 2024, the ICJ — a judicial body Kosovo has repeatedly relied on to solidify its own claims to sovereignty — ruled that Israel’s longstanding occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem violates international law. The International Criminal Court has also gone further, issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza.

Pali warned that Kosovo’s participation in the ISF carries tangible risks for both the Balkan nation’s government and its deployed troops. Unlike the 1999 intervention in Kosovo, Israel holds full veto power over all entry into Gaza and all participation in the ISF. “Participation could expose both Kosovar soldiers and the Kosovo government to significant legal and reputational risks, particularly if the international deployment were to facilitate forced displacement, consolidate Israeli control over Gaza, or otherwise contribute to internationally wrongful conduct,” Pali said. She also pointed out that Kosovar political leaders have largely ignored explicit public plans from Israeli officials to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population and replace it with Jewish-only settlements.

While Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population welcomed international forces in 1999 as protectors from violence, experts emphasize the U.S.- and Israeli-backed ISF serves an entirely different purpose in Gaza. “By participating in the ISF, Kosovo is effectively asking Palestinians to accept an international security architecture in which one of the principal parties responsible for the genocide in Gaza, which is the U.S., retains substantial influence over the security environment, while the Palestinian population has limited control over the institution determining its political future,” Pali explained.

The Board of Peace itself has already been widely condemned by global and Palestinian rights bodies. Eight independent United Nations experts have labeled the initiative an “illegal and illegitimate manoeuvre by powerful states driven by nostalgia and avarice.” The experts argue the board directly violates the Palestinian people’s fundamental right to self-determination and amounts to a modern colonial administration. Leading Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq has echoed that criticism, describing the Board of Peace and the ISF as a “blueprint for the indefinite alien occupation and de facto annexation of large parts of Gaza.”

Shpend Kursani, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Tartu’s Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies in Estonia, noted that Kosovo, alongside Albania and Morocco, was deliberately selected for the initiative as a handpicked group of majority-Muslim nations that had already secured full Israeli approval. The inclusion of these countries, Kursani explained, is intended to “sugarcoat” the deployment, framing it to Gaza’s population as a helping hand from fellow Muslim-majority states. Crucially, Kursani emphasized that the entire initiative is a private project with no legitimate international standing. “This is Trump’s private initiative. The Board of Peace has no international standing whatsoever,” Kursani said. “It is viewed as Trump’s private initiative, actually almost like a parallel initiative to the United Nations efforts and its main mission of peacekeeping.”

For Kosovo, which has still not secured full United Nations membership due to longstanding opposition from China and Russia, the geopolitical pressures of aligning with the second Trump presidency have left the small Balkan nation with limited room to maneuver. With no other major regional allies to rely on, and a large U.S. military base — Camp Bondsteel, the largest U.S. base in the Balkans, currently hosting around 1,000 U.S. troops — hosted on its soil, Kosovo’s leaders see alignment with U.S. policy as the only way to protect their own hard-won sovereignty against Serb revanchism. The U.S. force is widely viewed as the only meaningful bulwark against attempts by Serbia to reclaim control over the territory.

Sidita Kushi, assistant professor of politics at U.S.-based Mount Holyoke College, explained that Kosovo’s leadership is prioritizing its alliance with Washington in hopes of shoring up its own security and sovereign status by backing Trump administration foreign policy priorities. But Kushi also noted that even full alignment offers no long-term guarantee of favorable treatment from the Trump White House, pointing to Trump’s erratic approach to global relations, including threats to invade Greenland and revisit the United Kingdom’s claim to the Falklands. Trump has already threatened to upend European security by withdrawing U.S. troops from Germany over Berlin’s reluctance to back the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran.

“With few other natural allies in the region, both Kosovo and Albania are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and their political elites are choosing to follow perceived geopolitical interests and the status quo over undeniable human rights considerations,” Kushi added. For Kosovo, the cost of that choice may yet prove steep, as experts warn of growing legal and reputational damage from its involvement in a widely condemned initiative.