Plans for an international force in Gaza are moving forward, with American officials deep in talks to lock down details before presenting the blueprint soon. This push comes as the ceasefire teeters, fresh off Tuesday’s collapse when Israel hit back hard against what it called a Hamas strike in Rafah. The whole setup hinges on shaky ground, especially with Hamas expected to hand over control and weapons—something many doubt will ever happen without more force.
U.S. Central Command has taken charge of sketching out the force, dubbed the International Stabilization Force. It pairs troops from Arab and Muslim nations with a fresh Palestinian police unit, trained and screened by the U.S., Egypt, and Jordan.
“If we don’t have reliable security and governance in Gaza that the Israelis agree to, we will get stuck in a situation where Israel is attacking all the time,” one source tied to the planning said.
Nations like Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Turkey have signaled interest in sending soldiers, though others hesitate amid Gaza’s mess. Turkey’s role stands out as a flashpoint—Israel wants no part of it, but Washington insists on including them, along with Qatar and Egypt, to pressure Hamas into line.
“The Turks were very helpful in getting the Gaza deal and Netanyahu’s bashing Turkey has been very counterproductive,” a U.S. official noted.
This all ties into President Trump’s 20-point plan, where the force’s rollout is key to Israel pulling back from the half of Gaza it still holds. Borders with Israel and Egypt would get locked down to stop weapons flowing in. Yet everything depends on Hamas playing ball, which feels like a long shot given their track record of regrouping during lulls. U.S. and Israeli voices say Hamas is weaker than it’s been in decades, squeezed by sealed crossings and Israel’s grip on territory.
“Hamas has a pretty low glass ceiling now,” a senior U.S. official remarked.
Behind closed doors, Trump’s team—including envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Vice President Vance, and Secretary of State Rubio—has been hashing this out in Israel recently. They floated ideas on troop numbers, but Israelis pushed back, saying effectiveness beats size, and the force needs local buy-in plus a real spine to confront threats. ”
The Israelis are nervous and skeptical because they are not in control and they don’t have the cards anymore. We told them, ‘Let’s create the right circumstances and see if Hamas is serious or not,'” a U.S. official explained.
Friction boils over the force’s mandate. No one wants their troops sucked into battles with Hamas or caught between factions. If Hamas signs off, the setup shifts to peacekeeping, not outright war.
“If you are going into an environment where Hamas sees you as an occupying force, it will be hard. But if Hamas consents, it’s a different situation,” a deeply involved source said.
Mediators like Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey claim Hamas might go along with border watches and internal ops, but only if fighters get real amnesty—not just lip service before the hunts resume.
Skeptics point to a bigger game here. Why rush a UN Security Council resolution to greenlight this, when it hands oversight to outsiders and echoes failed missions in Lebanon or Afghanistan? It smells like another layer of global control, where nations with ties to radicals—like Turkey or Qatar—get a foothold, potentially propping up Hamas remnants under the guise of stability. And with the ceasefire already cracking, as seen in recent strikes that killed dozens, it’s clear this “peace” is just a pause for rearming. Netanyahu himself declared Israel will veto any unacceptable foreign troops, a stance that could torpedo the whole thing if Washington keeps pushing allies Israel distrusts.
U.S. officials stress caution. “It is better to move slow and get it right because we are not gonna have a second chance,” one told reporters. Decisions on the force’s makeup drop in days, with the pitch to Israel and contributors following.
Interest runs high in the region—”Nobody rejected it and they all wait to see the final design,” per a U.S. official—but history screams failure. “Most people who know the history of this conflict don’t give it a large chance for success. You have to be nuts not to be skeptical,” another planner admitted.
One thing remains crystal clear: American soldiers stay out. No boots on the ground in Gaza, period. Washington’s role sticks to training, vetting, and watching from afar, avoiding the quagmire that has drained us before. If this force flops—and odds say it might—the cycle spins on, with hidden hands possibly benefiting from the chaos.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.