Kosovo needed international law to survive. Now it's helping Israel bypass it in Gaza - Middle East Eye

After Israel’s approval, Kosovo on Monday officially signed up to US President Donald Trump’s controversial so-called Board of Peace and the International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza.

In a statement on X, the Board of Peace called the signing ceremony a “landmark” event that underscored “Kosovo's commitment to the ISF mission and its continued support for the strategic objectives in President Trump's 20-Point Peace Plan”.

The Board of Peace went on to say that Kosovo had deployed soldiers to Israel in early spring, far earlier than publicly stated, and that they were “leading planning across logistics, civil affairs”, as well as operating in Gaza and clearing “unexploded ordnance”.

The Kosovo mission, however, has proved controversial in the majority-Muslim country, where people have held pro-Palestine protests and shown clear sympathy for the plight of Palestinians amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

In contrast, Kosovo’s political establishment, either out of fear or for ideological reasons, has acquiesced to demands from the Trump administration that align with Israeli interests.

On 30 March, Kosovo’s left-leaning prime minister, Albin Kurti, said: “We are ready to participate and help the people of Gaza, because we ourselves have been and are beneficiaries of international forces since 1999.”

In 1999, international forces led by the US bombed Serbia for two and a half months in an attempt to halt its ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population.

Kurti’s equivalence between the two might prove politically useful in convincing a domestic audience that firmly opposes the genocide in Gaza. However, it has also raised eyebrows.

“The comparison is, in my view, fundamentally unconvincing,” said Brunilda Pali, an assistant professor of conflict dynamics and resolution in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam.

“The international intervention in Kosovo followed a genocidal war in which the international community had identified a grave humanitarian catastrophe,” Pali told Middle East Eye.

“Gaza presents a fundamentally different problem,” she said, adding that “as a main supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US is not at all credible as a peacekeeper.”

Like Serbia before it, Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Gaza.

In 2024, the ICJ, a court Kosovo has relied on to reinforce its own sovereignty, found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem was unlawful under international law.

The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Unlike Serbia however, Israel has a veto over who enters Gaza and who participates in the International Stabilisation Force.

“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,” said Pali.

Nor do Albanian politicians in Kosovo appear particularly concerned that Israeli ministers have laid out detailed plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its indigenous population and replace them with Jewish-only settlements.

While Albanians welcomed international forces in 1999 for the protection they would provide, the US- and Israeli-backed ISF has entered Gaza for a decidedly different purpose.

“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 US, retains substantial influence over the security environment, while the Palestinian population has limited control over the institution determining its political future,” said Pali.

Eight independent UN experts jointly described the Board of Peace as an “illegal and illegitimate manoeuvre by powerful states driven by nostalgia and avarice”.

The board, they said, violated Palestinians’ right to self-determination and represented nothing short of a colonial administration.

The Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq described the board 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 Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, in Estonia, noted that Kosovo, Albania and Morocco were “carefully handpicked Muslim majority countries … with full Israeli approval”.

In addition to maintaining good relations with Israel, these countries are there to “sugarcoat” the deployment “and tell Gazans that these are the … Muslim countries that have come to Gaza to help Gaza”, Kursani told MEE.

“This is Trump's private initiative. The Board of Peace has no international standing whatsoever,” said Kursani. “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.”

Kosovo has not yet gained admission to the UN, primarily because of Chinese and Russian opposition. In the age of a capricious Trump presidency, Kosovo finds itself with few choices.

If Trump can threaten to invade Greenland or revisit the UK’s claim over the Falklands, some in Kosovo wonder what he could do to the small Balkan nation, precariously perched in the international pecking order.

“Kosovo appears to be prioritising its alliance with the US, hoping to preserve its own security and sovereignty by following US foreign policy initiatives, like the Board of Peace,” said Sidita Kushi, an assistant professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College in the US.

Kosovo hosts Camp Bondsteel, the largest military base in the Balkans, which houses around 1,000 US troops. The force is largely seen as the only bulwark against Serb revanchism.

Trump has already threatened to upend the European security order by withdrawing troops from Germany over its reluctance to participate in the Israeli-US war on Iran.

“But, of course, its dutiful allyship and gratefulness do not guarantee Kosovo long-term favourable standing with the US, as recent history has shown,” Kushi noted, referring to Greenland and the Falklands.

“Yet 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,” she added.