Washington suspended Kosovo’s Strategic Dialogue. Its Gaza force had Kosovo officers at work months before the agreement was signed.
Drizan Shala | 8 September 2026
The signature came last. Kosovo's officers had already been at work for months.
The sequence is in the document itself. The press release the International Stabilization Force issued in Prishtina on 7 September records the signing of the Participating Country Agreement, then, four paragraphs down, records something older: "Since early spring, Kosovo Security Force members have been deployed at ISF headquarters, leading planning across logistics, civil affairs, and unexploded ordnance clearing operations." The signature is dated September. The work is dated March or April.
Between the two sits the Assembly vote of 17 April, 89 in favour, none against, and the authorisation of the acting president, Albulena Haxhiu. On 26 April the KSF said it had sent a team to Gaza for a preliminary assessment and deployment coordination. Ejup Maqedonci, the acting Minister of Defence, told AP the contingent would be several dozen officers with demining units among them. "Our country has been a security consumer, meaning NATO countries have contributed to the security of the Republic of Kosovo," he said. "Today we are entering a phase where we are becoming a provider, or exporter, of security."
The signatures on 7 September were force to force. The Board of Peace's post names the signatories as Lieutenant General Bashkim Jashari for the KSF and Major General Jasper Jeffers for the ISF; Maqedonci and a Board representative attended. Jeffers came to Prishtina. Jashari said at the ceremony that participation in international missions fits the state's vision of contributing to peace and security beyond its own borders.
The force Kosovo formally joined has still not deployed into Gaza. Security Council Resolution 2803 created it in November 2025. Israel's cabinet approved an initial entry of up to 200 personnel on 26 July. Jeffers said in February that the force's target strength was around 20,000 and that Indonesia, then pledging 8,000 troops, had accepted the deputy-command position. Indonesia subsequently put that deployment on hold. Morocco signed its own agreement on 15 July. Kazakhstan, Albania and Uganda are confirmed. Türkiye was vetoed by Israel. Deployment remains stalled over Hamas's disarmament and Israel's corresponding withdrawal commitments. On the day Kosovo signed, the Board's high representative, Nikolay Mladenov, said discussions were still continuing with Israel over implementation of its side of the roadmap: "we're not there yet."
Kosovo's officers have been planning the logistics for that force since spring anyway.
Kosovo's planned Strategic Dialogue with the United States has been suspended indefinitely since September 2025. North Macedonia held the second session of its dialogue in Washington in April. Serbia opened its first on 17 July, Marko Đurić across the table from Marco Rubio. On 30 May 2023 Ambassador Jeffrey Hovenier announced Kosovo's exclusion from Defender Europe 23 as the first American consequence for the government's actions in the north. On 23 February 2024 Gabriel Escobar said the government was not treating Washington "as a partner," was not consulting it, and was making American advocacy for Kosovo's Euro-Atlantic integration harder.
The operational record over the same period reads differently. When the United States assembled a Gaza force from which Israel vetoed Türkiye and Indonesia subsequently put its 8,000-troop deployment on hold, the personnel writing its plans at headquarters included Kosovars. They were there before the Agreement was signed and before Israel's July decision. Morocco had not yet signed either. The release calls their contribution "integral." That is a word an organisation uses about people who are doing something it needs done, however difficult Washington's relationship with their government may be elsewhere.
Two Serbian facts from the same fortnight. On 24 August Serbia's defence minister, Bratislav Gašić, received Major General Guo Hongtao, deputy director of the Office for International Military Cooperation of China's Central Military Commission, for the second session of the military-affairs subcommittee between Serbia and China; Gašić said Chinese weapons purchases had significantly enhanced the Serbian Armed Forces' operational capabilities. On 3 September a Serbian government aircraft brought Ratko Mladić's coffin from The Hague. Four days later Serbian Army personnel took part in his burial at Topčider. Serbia keeps its Strategic Dialogue.
What Kosovo did is narrower than the phrase "reliable ally" usually implies, and more specific. It committed personnel and expertise to an American-led mission at the point where the mission was politically awkward and operationally uncertain, then kept them there through five months in which the force did not enter Gaza. The signature on 7 September formalised a decision the state had already carried out. Whether the ISF ever crosses into Rafah is not in Kosovo's hands. What was in its hands, it has done.
