US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace held its inaugural meeting in Washington on 19 February, chaired by Trump himself and in the presence of leaders from 22 countries, two of them European in the shape of Hungary and Bulgaria.
The major European countries, on the other hand, have preferred to adopt a wait-and-see attitude to the board lest the ultimate aim behind its launch is to sideline the United Nations. The Vatican declined an invitation to join. The European Union was represented by an official from the European Commission.
The Charter of the Board was signed on 22 January on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Although the main objective of the board is to end the war in Gaza, no representative of the Palestinian Authority (PA) was invited to attend the February meeting, which dealt with the reconstruction of Gaza and the raising of the necessary financial resources for its reconstruction, which will take ten years according to some reliable estimates.
Chief Commissioner of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) Ali Shaath attended the board’s first meeting.
Trump pledged $10 billion to the board, and the other member countries committed the total sum of $5 billion. It is interesting to note in this respect that the International Football Federation FIFA is planning to contribute $75 million to finance football clubs in Gaza.
Trump stressed that Hamas would have to disarm in order to proceed with the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza at the end of the second phase of the ceasefire agreement signed last October. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated, something that he does quite often, that reconstruction in Gaza will not begin unless Hamas disarms.
Netanyahu did not attend the Washington meeting of the board and sent Foreign Minister Gideon Sager to head the Israeli delegation.
No announcements were made at the meeting concerning the final composition of the International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza, although many people expected one. The only announcement made in this regard came from the Indonesian government, which said it was ready to deploy 1,000 troops to Gaza immediately and further thousands later on.
Turkey talked about participating in the policing of Gaza, even though the Israeli government has made it clear that it will not accept Turkish participation in the ISF. So far, the American administration has not announced whether Turkey will be part of this force.
Whether the second phase of the ceasefire agreement will successfully conclude with the scheduled withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza will be the litmus test of its effectiveness, or the absence of it, in securing such a withdrawal. One of the basic criticisms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict in Gaza concerns the Israeli-inspired linkage between an Israeli withdrawal and the disarmament of Hamas and what has been termed the “de-radicalisation” of Gaza.
Hamas has publicly rejected laying down its arms before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is certain. In election-campaign mode, Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will not withdraw from the enclave before the “complete disarmament” of Hamas.
Another test for the Board of Peace will be the future of the Occupied West Bank and whether it will take a firm position on Israeli policies and measures that have seen nothing short of the creeping annexation of it.
On 8 February, the Israeli security cabinet decided that all land in the West Bank is to be considered state land, an unprecedented decision since the June 1967 War. The timing of this decision to a few days before the first meeting of the Board of Peace was no coincidence.
The American administration has remained silent on this, but the American Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a prominent Evangelical Christian and supporter of the settlement movement, in an interview recorded on 18 February and aired 24 hours after the Board of Peace meeting in Washington, said that Israel is entitled to the biblical land of Israel, or, as he put it, the land that God had promised the Jews.
At the time of writing, no official reaction from the American administration has been forthcoming on whether these remarks run counter to the official position of the United States government. Trump’s peace plan rejects “annexation” and “occupation”.
Meanwhile, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report on 19 February covering the period from November 2024 to October 2025, and so under both the Biden and the Trump administrations, on Israeli policies in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. This talks about “intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighbourhoods, and the denial of humanitarian assistance [that] appear to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza.”
The report calls on all states to cease the sale of arms and military equipment to Israel, since these are used for “facilitating violations in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
The New York Times also published an article by columnist Thomas Friedman on 17 February that rightly stressed that “the annexationist ambitions of the Netanyahu cabinet directly clash with Trump’s 20-point plan, which imagines a two-state solution.”
It is now up to Trump and his Board of Peace to prove that this institution is not merely a talking shop to cover up the annexation of the Occupied West Bank and the permanent geographical separation of Gaza and the West Bank.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 February, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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