“Trump Has Staked His Presidency On the Gaza Peace Deal”

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The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records.

The site is envisioned as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force (ISF), planned as a multinational military force composed of pledged troops.

The ISF is part of the newly created Board of Peace which is meant to govern Gaza. The Board of Peace is chaired by Trump and led in part by his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The plans reviewed by the Guardian call for the phased construction of a military outpost that will eventually have a footprint of 1,400 metres by 1,100 metres, ringed by 26 trailer-mounted armored watch towers, a small arms range, bunkers, and a warehouse for military equipment for operations. The entire base will be encircled with barbed wire.

The fortification is planned for an arid stretch of flatlands in southern Gaza strewn with saltbush and white broom shrubs, and littered with twisted metal from years of Israeli bombardment.

A source close to the planning tells the Guardian that a small group of bidders – international construction companies with experience in war zones – have already been shown the area in a site visit.

The Indonesian government has reportedly offered to send up to 8,000 troops. Indonesia’s president was one of four south-east Asian leaders scheduled to attend an inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington DC on Thursday.

The UN security council authorized the Board of Peace to establish a temporary International Stabilization Force in Gaza.

The ISF, according to the UN, will be tasked with securing Gaza’s border and maintaining peace within the area. It’s also supposed to protect civilians, and train and support “vetted Palestinian police forces”.

It is unclear what the ISF’s rules of engagement would be if there is combat, renewed bombing by Israel, or attacks by Hamas.

Nor is it clear what role the ISF is meant to play in disarming Hamas, an Israeli condition to proceed with Gaza’s reconstruction.

While more than 20 countries have signed up as members of the Board of Peace, much of the world has stayed away.

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Although it was set up with the UN’s approval, the organization’s charter appears to grant Trump permanent leadership and control.

The Board of Peace is a kind of legal fiction, nominally with its own international legal personality separate from both the UN and the United States, but in reality it’s just an empty shell for the United States to use as it sees fit,” said Adil Haque, a professor of law at Rutgers University.

Experts say the funding and governance structures are murky, and several contractors have told the American Observer that conversations with US officials are often conducted on Signal rather than over government email.

“Trump Has Staked His Presidency On the Gaza Peace Deal,” the economist Jeff Sachs says.

The military base contracting document was issued by the Board of Peace, according to a person familiar with the process, and prepared with the help of US contracting officials.

One section of the document describes a “Human Remains Protocol”.

“If suspected human remains or cultural artifacts are discovered, all work in the immediate area must cease immediately, the area must be secured, and the Contracting Officer must be notified immediately for direction,” it says.

The bodies of about 10,000 Palestinians are believed to be buried under the rubble in Gaza, according to Gaza’s civil defense agency.

It is unclear who owns the land where the military compound is set to be built, but much of the south Gaza area is currently under Israeli control. The UN estimates that at least 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced during the war.

Officials from US Central Command referred all questions about the military base to the Board of Peace.

A Trump administration official declined to discuss the military base contract: “As the President has said, no US boots will be on the ground. We’re not going to discuss leaked documents.”

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How Did an Iraqi Shepherd Reveal the Most Secret Israeli Military Base?

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The truck rattling by at 2 p.m. on March 3 was a familiar sight to residents of the Bedouin encampment in Iraq’s rugged western desert — a local shepherd’s pickup, en route to the nearest town of al-Nukhaib.

Its return a few hours later, flaming and riddled with bullets, was anything but routine.

A helicopter was chasing the truck, three witnesses from the camp said, firing on it repeatedly until it jerked to a halt in the sand.

The deadly attack, which has not been previously reported, took place after Awad al-Shammari, 29, set off on a grocery trip, his cousin, Amir al-Shammari.

Instead of making it home, the shepherd stumbled upon a closely guarded Israeli military secret, hidden in the Iraqi desert. His family believes it cost him his life.

Al-Shammari’s discovery would ultimately reveal how Iraq had played host to two covert bases operated intermittently by Israel, a hostile state, for well over a year.

Sometime between starting his ill-fated trip and its gruesome end, Al-Shammari had contacted Iraq’s regional military command to report what he had seen: soldiers, helicopters and tents clustered around a landing strip.

Israel was operating a base there to support its military operations against Baghdad’s regional partner, Iran, according to senior Iraqi and regional officials.

The presence of an Israeli outpost in Iraq was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. Iraqi officials told The Times there was another undisclosed second base also in Iraq’s western desert.

The base Al-Shammari came across predated the current war between the United States, Israel and Iran, the regional security officials said, and was used during the 12-day war against Tehran in June 2025.

Israeli forces began preparing to build the makeshift base as far back as late 2024, one of the regional officials said — identifying remote sites from which to operate in future conflicts.

Israel’s military declined repeated requests for comment on the camps or on Al-Shammari’s killing.

The witnesses to Al-Shammari’s death spoke on condition of anonymity, citing concerns for their safety. Most of the officials who discussed the Israeli bases insisted on anonymity to discuss a highly sensitive security matter.

The information they shared indicates that at least one of the bases — the one Al-Shammari stumbled upon — had been known to Washington since June 2025 or possibly earlier. That would most likely mean Baghdad’s other key ally, the United States, had withheld from Iraq the fact that hostile forces were on its soil.

The disclosure of the bases raise uncomfortable questions for Iraq, too. Among them: Were its forces really unaware of a foreign presence until a shepherd exposed it? Or did they know, but chose to ignore it?

Either possibility reflects how Iraq, long trapped in a tug of war between Washington and Tehran, remains unable to exercise full control over its territory.

Shortly after that, General al-Gurayti and Al-Shammari’s family said, the army and his relatives lost contact with him.

His family searched two days before finding the Bedouin residents who had witnessed his killing, learning what had become of him.

“We were told that a burned-up pickup truck the same as Awad’s was out there, but no one dared to go there,” the cousin, Amir, said. “When we got there, we found the car and body burned.”

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Four people in white garments stand near a heavily burned, rusted pickup truck in a sandy desert landscape.

His family shared photographs of his bloodied corpse, his head and fingers blackened, and his charred pickup truck. They buried his body next to the vehicle, beneath a simple gray tombstone.

A day after the shepherd’s report, Iraq’s regional command dispatched a reconnaissance mission, according to General al-Gurayti and General al-Hamdani.

As the units approached the area, they came under fire, according to a statement released a day later by Iraq’s Joint Operations Command.

One soldier was killed, two were wounded and two vehicles were bombed before the units decided to retreat.

Top Iraqi security officials in Baghdad were struggling to understand what had happened.

Two senior officials said their efforts were repeatedly frustrated by top military commanders, who played down the incident.

In public, Iraq’s Joint Operations Command announced “foreign” forces had attacked their soldiers, and said it had raised complaints at the U.N. Security Council.

In private, the chief of staff of Iraq’s armed forces, Gen. Abdul-Amir Yarallah, called his counterparts in the U.S. military, according to General al-Hamdani and the two senior Iraqi officials. “They confirmed the force is not an American force,” General al-Hamdani said. “So we understood it was Israeli.”

Four days after the attack on the Iraqi soldiers, on March 8, the Iraqi Parliament compelled military leaders to provide a confidential debriefing. Lawmakers who were present said they could not divulge details.

Ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Baghdad has struggled with a political balancing act between its former occupier, Washington, and its powerful neighbor, Iran.

The Trump administration has put immense pressure on Iraq to curb Iranian influence. In particular, Washington wants Iraq to disarm militia figures aligned with Iran, and block them from roles in the government and security forces.

For years, Iraqi leaders were either unable or unwilling to do that, raising tensions with Washington.

The Israeli bases in Iraq put an already wobbly equilibrium at greater risk, said Ramzy Mardini, founder of Geopol Labs, a Middle East-based risk advisory firm.

“Engagement with the U.S. now risks being framed as alignment with Israel,” he said. “If the war with Iran resumes, it could provide a pretext for more direct Iranian military involvement in Iraq.”

Today, the Israeli base in al-Nukhaib is no longer operative. The status of the other Israeli outpost in Iraq is unknown.

The family of the shepherd says his killing has been ignored.

“They demand the government investigate this incident and why it happened,” his cousin, Amir, said. “They want his rights respected.”

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🇷🇺Putin Is Back. Russia Resupplies Its Air Base in Syria


Russia resupplied its air base in Syria through a cargo ship delivery last month, signaling Moscow’s intention to maintain its strategic military foothold in the country.

Citing unnamed US officials and reviewed satellite images, Damascus-based Western sources report that the cargo ship Sparta left the Russian city of St. Petersburg in March and arrived at Syria's Tartus port in May.

The report described the delivery, made while the vessel was escorted by Russian navy ships for much of its journey, as the first such resupply mission since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime.

According to some US officials, the vessel was carrying equipment for the nearby Russian air base at Khmeimim. The report noted that its owner is under US sanctions for delivering weapons on Russia's behalf.

The move indicates Russia has retained use of the base despite Assad's fall, the report said.

Aron Lund, a Syria expert at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, says he

“believes Russia succeeded in convincing Damascus to keep control of its bases.”

The report also said the ship is part of a small fleet Russia has used for clandestine shipments of weapons and other military equipment in the region.

“Some U.S. officials said the Sparta's resupply mission didn't raise alarm bells, because the Syrian government's ties with Moscow are known and the military equipment is far from American interests, primarily in the country's northeast,”

he added.

The report said Russia withdrew many of its personnel from Syria after Assad's fall, but cited a US official familiar with intelligence assessments as saying that hundreds of Russian personnel remain in the country.

Russia maintains two key military facilities in Syria: a naval logistics base in Tartus and the Khmeimim air base in the northwestern province of Latakia.

The future of the facilities was also discussed during a meeting between Syrian officials and Putin in January, the report added.

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