Section 925: Codifying the U.S. as Israel's Enforcement Arm in Gaza

Section 925 of the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2027 commits the United States to a new overseas military operation. It authorizes the Secretary of Defense to maintain the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC), a body based in Southern Israel, and to extend its mission through the end of 2027. That mission is not a coherent one. Section 925 hands the CMCC a set of goals that are structurally incompatible with one another, provides no exit criteria for any of them, and creates the exact conditions that generate mission creep: an open-ended commitment with an expansive mandate and no articulated definition of success.

What Section 925 Does

Section 925 authorizes the Secretary of Defense to maintain and operate the CMCC in Israel through December 31, 2027. By March 1, 2027, the Secretary is required to submit a report to the Congressional Armed Services Committees detailing the CMCC’s role in planning and coordinating civil-military activities related to security, stabilization, and reconstruction in Gaza. The legislation directs that the goals of that plan include:

• The permanent disarmament of Hamas;

• The exclusion of Hamas from Gaza’s government;

• The elimination of Hamas’s access to financial and material resources, including humanitarian aid; and

• The training of an International Stabilization Force (ISF).

Section 925 further requires the report to outline the CMCC’s mission, personnel structure, director’s responsibilities, funding, relationship to the Board of Peace, and support for the ISF and Palestinian security forces. Finally, in partnership with the Commander of U.S. Central Command, the Secretary must report to the same Committees every 180 days on the CMCC’s staffing and leadership; any casualties in the region; the body’s relationships with partners; Hamas’s activity surrounding humanitarian aid; the quantity and kind of aid accessible in Gaza; and the ISF’s structure, goals, activity, efficacy, and relationship with Palestinian police forces.

What the CMCC Is

The CMCC was established in October 2025 as part of the Comprehensive Plan to End the Conflict in Gaza, the framework that emerged from President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. It is currently based in Kiryat Gat, a small industrial city in southern Israel. According to U.S. Central Command, the unified combatant command directing American military operations across twenty-one countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, the CMCC’s purpose is to preserve the ceasefire, deescalate violations, coordinate humanitarian assistance, and support stability and long-term development in Gaza.

On May 1, 2026, Reuters reported that the CMCC would be wound down and folded into the International Stabilization Force, with its facility redesignated as the International Gaza Support Centre. The Board of Peace has denied that account, although subsequent reporting indicates that the ISF and CMCC are, in fact, exploring models for closer coordination and integration. Section 925 would override that uncertainty entirely. It assigns the CMCC a mission and lifespan beyond what has been described to the American public.

Incompatible Missions Under One Roof

The central problem with Section 925 is that the missions it assigns to the CMCC cannot coexist. Is the CMCC a humanitarian coordinator, a military training mission, or a political-military body whose job is to defeat Hamas? Section 925 makes it all three at once, and these goals are inherently incompatible.

A legitimate mediator cannot also be a combatant. Why would Hamas engage the CMCC to deescalate a confrontation when the CMCC’s other goal is to remove Hamas from power and disarm it entirely? More importantly: what happens when it is Israel, not Hamas, that violates the ceasefire? Section 925 gives the CMCC no authority or goal to deescalate Israeli actions, no mechanism to compel Israeli withdrawal from territory it refuses to vacate, and no accountability framework for Israeli conduct of any kind. The legislation builds a one-sided enforcement structure and calls it neutral coordination.

The incompatibility is not confined to the negotiating table. It follows the CMCC into every operational relationship the bill assigns it. How can an international NGO whose mission is to deliver humanitarian assistance to the ground regardless of what forces or parties control what areas share needs assessments, movement patterns, or beneficiary lists with a coordinator whose mandate inherently requires intelligence collection against one of the major actors in Gaza? Under Section 925, the suspicion that humanitarian assistance is being used as a political instrument, or as a channel for intelligence gathering, is not a paranoia. It is a reasonable concern of what the section 925 authorizes. That suspicion alone is enough to keep humanitarian actors at arm’s length from the CMCC, which is the opposite of what effective coordination requires.

The training relationship raises the same problem in reverse. Section 925 directs the CMCC to train the International Stabilization Force. An ISF trained by an organization openly committed to defeating Hamas, and simultaneously exempting Israel from any restraint, will be perceived on the ground as an extension of a one-sided campaign rather than as a neutral security force. That perception creates both a force protection problem for the ISF, and a political problem for its troop-contributing countries. On the former, by associating the ISF with the mission of defeating and disarming Hamas, it converts every ISF member into a legitimate target in the eyes of any faction whose interests the CMCC’s political mission works against. On the latter, it makes it even more difficult for the troop contributing countries to sustain domestic support because the task transitions from being purely humanitarian to one of partisanship in a conflict. On both counts, such a mandate will make recruitment of ISF partner nations substantially harder than it already is.

The Pattern of Israeli Violations

Turning to the ceasefire monitoring directive that focuses itself on Hamas but not Israel: the asymmetry is not abstract. Israeli ceasefire violations are extensive, documented, and ongoing.

Since the ceasefire was announced on October 10, 2025, Israeli airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire have killed 1,031 Palestinians. The Israeli government has issued maps to aid groups indicating a nearly eleven percent increase in areas under Israeli occupation since the ceasefire’s initial yellow line. On May 28, 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the IDF to seize seventy percent of the Gaza Strip. Each expansion is a direct and intentional violation of the agreement the CMCC was created to preserve.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has also documented the conduct of “Palestinian armed elements in Gaza that appear to be backed by Israeli forces.” These groups have set up checkpoints, detained Palestinians, and disappeared at least one member of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. They have attacked Hamas in an effort to take control of Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza.

One such group is The Popular Forces, founded by Yasser Abu Shabab and operating in the Rafah area of southern Gaza. The European Council on Foreign Relations describes the Popular Forces as both a Palestinian armed group and a criminal gang. It receives Israeli protection and support, including weapons, in exchange for opposing Hamas. The group is widely accused of looting UN aid convoys, precisely the crime Israel has invoked to justify restricting aid into Gaza in the first place.

These dynamics carry a predictable consequence. The longer Israel arms and shields rival factions inside Gaza, the more entrenched Hamas becomes in its refusal to disarm. Section 925 does not acknowledge this dynamic, much less address it.

A Humanitarian Crisis Sidelined

While Section 925 orients the CMCC toward a political-military mission against Hamas, the humanitarian mission it nominally exists to support is collapsing. The United Nations reports severe shortages of engine oil, tires, and spare parts that are placing life-saving humanitarian operations at risk across the Gaza Strip, with particular impact on healthcare facilities. UN officials describe humanitarian operations as heavily constrained. Basic human needs, clean water, sanitation, food, shelter, and health care, are going unmet.

This is the work the CMCC could be doing. It is not the work Section 925 prioritizes.

What This Really Is

There is a defensible argument for military logistical support to humanitarian operations in Gaza. There may even be a defensible argument for an international security presence under the right conditions. What there is not, and what Section 925 actually creates, is a role for the United States as a political actor, a one-sided enforcer, a trainer of forces, and a humanitarian coordinator, all simultaneously, all from a facility inside Israeli territory, and all without any mechanism for restraining the only party with the power to break the ceasefire at will.

This approach undermines the effectiveness of the CMCC’s mission in humanitarian assistance. It diminishes the attractiveness of the ISF and CMCC to international partners who will not sign on to an architecture that exempts Israel from accountability. And it creates a slippery slope by which the United States falls deeper into complicity with Israel’s illegal conduct in Gaza.

Section 925 follows a familiar pattern. When direct, unconditional support for Israel becomes politically untenable on its own merits, its defenders embed it inside legislation that Congress cannot easily reject. The NDAA is the perfect vehicle. It will pass. But Section 925 can be stripped from the NDAA. The country does not need to absorb this policy. And the public, whose support for unconditional aid is now in rapid decline, can tell congress no to section 925.