Trump’s “Board of Peace” Meets, Promotes Its Dystopian Vision for Gaza’s Regeneration, as Hamas’s Disarmament Still Eludes Everyone
22.2.26
A screenshot from a video of the first meeting on Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, dominated, in the front row, by Trump and his close associates.Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
On February 18, in the apocalyptic wasteland of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian survivors of Israel’s ongoing 28-month genocide celebrated the start of Ramadan with astonishing ingenuity, crafting decorations from the recycled detritus of destruction, powering and stringing up lights, and holding communal meals drawing on the increase of food deliveries since the ceasefire that began four months ago.This is in spite of the fact that Israel has persistently refused to honor the requirements for the delivery of 600 trucks of humanitarian aid a day under the ceasefire deal, which began on October 10, and which was trumpeted by the US as Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, even though most of the hard work had been done by negotiators from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, working with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Much of what has been begrudgingly allowed into Gaza by Israel consists of commercial goods that are unaffordable for the majority of the population, who have been made homeless, are reduced to living in tents with few of their possessions left, and have little or no money.
While the Palestinians’ spirit contrasts buoyantly with the grimness of their surroundings, it cannot disguise that they continue to live in a landscape that is brutally shattered, to an extent that is almost beyond comprehension, and that no salvation is on the horizon. Voices from within Gaza emphasize that the majority of the displaced population haven’t been attending these communal meals, and numerous photos show much more wretched scenes, of families struggling to put together even the most basic meals in landscapes of utter destruction.
Ramadan in Gaza. A photo posted on X by Muhammad Smiry.The first phase of the ceasefire deal
Although it continues to be hugely significant that the ceasefire brought to an end the relentless carpet-bombing and aggressive military occupation that had been an almost relentless feature of the first two years of the genocide, it remains startlingly apparent that Israel routinely breaks the ceasefire deal, having attacked Gaza on 114 of the first 132 days of the ceasefire, killing over 600 Palestinians and injuring over 1,600, just as it is apparent that its stranglehold on aid deliveries savagely prevents the necessary delivery of, in particular, adequate medical supplies.
Israel’s obstruction also continues to prevent the delivery of mobile homes that could replace the inadequate tents, as well as any equipment at all that could be used to begin to clear the 60 million tonnes of rubble created as a result of Israel’s sickening enthusiasm for the relentless genocidal destruction of Gaza and its people; what the 1948 Genocide Convention describes as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, which not only includes “killing” and “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, but also “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
To make matters worse, the surviving Palestinians are hemmed into just 40% of the land mass of the Gaza Strip, with Israel controlling the other 60%, behind the heavily-fortified “yellow line” to which they were required to withdraw under the ceasefire deal, where they have been fairly openly destroying whatever shattered buildings remained to remove even the vaguest possibility that those who once lived there might ever return and find any semblance of home.
The second phase of the ceasefire deal, the disarmament of Hamas, and a grim techno-futuristic vision for Gaza
Under the second phase of the ceasefire deal, Israel was supposed to withdraw from the “yellow line” to a “red line” closer to the border, but that was contingent on the mobilization of an International Stablilization Force, as envisaged in the “Peace Plan”, one of a cluster of innovations that was also supposed to include the establishment of a Palestinian technocratic committee to oversee the day-to-day running of Gaza, itself overseen by a “Board of Peace” presided over by Donald Trump and including mostly US real estate developers and investors, and representatives of the other main negotiating nations involved in establishing the “Peace Plan” and the ceasefire deal.
A map showing the supposed phases of Israeli military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. No indication exists of when, or how the second phase of withdrawal to the “red line” might occur.Central to all of the above, however, is the fundamentally unresolvable issue of the disarmament of Hamas and the other Palestinian militant factions, although that, crucially, is a topic on which Hamas’s leaders very publicly refused to be drawn when they agreed to the first phase of the ceasefire, explicitly stating that it would have to wait for future negotiations, because it would be suicidal for them to offer to relinquish all their weapons without an absolutely unassailable guarantee that Israel would not immediately resume its genocidal slaughter without the prospect of any resistance.
The caution of Hamas’s leaders was, of course, completely understandable, but at the same time they also had no hesitation in pledging to hand over control to a new Palestinian-led administration, to which they would also hand over their weapons if peace, security and autonomy were guaranteed.
For Israel, the disarmament of Hamas had always been an alleged key aim of their genocidal assault, and it assumed even greater prominence after another alleged key aim — securing the return of all the hostages seized during the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — was finally realized with the return of the last deceased hostage on January 26.
However, since Trump imposed his “Peace Plan” on October 10, Israel has been noticeably restrained in the fulfilment of its much more fundamental aim — the unobstructed pursuit of the complete destruction of Gaza and the extermination of its people, and its complete takeover, accompanied by its ongoing efforts to secure the complete annexation of the West Bank.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is largely adept at indulging Trump — if for no other reason than to maintain the US’s unending supply of weapons to Israel — but behind the scenes Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the two fanatical, messianic, far-right settler ministers who Netanyahu relies on to maintain his coalition government, as well as his relentlessly bellicose defense minister, Israel Katz, have barely been able to contain their frustration that interfering outsiders should seek to restrain them or to interfere with what they clearly regard as their divinely-mandated mission of finally cleansing the whole of historic Palestine of its indigenous population — not just Gaza, but also the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which have, over the last 28 months, also been subjected to savage and ever-increasing aggression.
As Netanyahu pragmatically sought to placate Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in particular, whose position, at the forefront of the settler movement, envisages a takeover of Palestinian lands that resembles the frontier history of the United States, cosplayed through a fictional Zionist lens, Steve Witkoff announced the launch of the second phase of the “Peace Plan” on January 14, swiftly followed by a horrific vision for Gaza’s future that was launched a week later at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, at which Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a prominent real estate investor, unveiled plans for a “New Gaza” of luxury beachside tower blocks, new residential cities and industrial complexes from which, noticeably, the Palestinians themselves were absent.
The grotesque vision for “New Gaza”, as unveiled by Jared Kushner at Davos on January 22.As I described it at the time, Kushner’s vision — backed by the other international investors and facilitators on the “Board of Peace” — was almost unimaginably ghoulish, a techno-futuristic vision rising up not in some pristine desert, or on some sort of neglected brownfield site, but on a genocidal crime scene of unparalleled depravity.
Kushner and his colleagues, however — including Trump himself, of course, Witkoff, and a handful of other ghouls, including asset manager Marc Rowan, World Bank president Ajay Banga and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — are all, very evidently, heartless monsters devoid of humanity and obsessed solely with the profits available from Gaza’s Mediterranean location. This has been unexpectedly announced by Trump almost a year before, in February 2025, when, during one of Netanyahu’s repeated visits to the White House, he boasted of the US taking over Gaza and turning it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”, an announcement that seemed to take everyone, including Netanyahu, by surprise.
As Kushner himself admitted, however, none of the fabulous investment opportunities offered by “New Gaza” will materialize without “security.” As he described it at Davos, “Without security, nobody’s going to make investments, nobody’s gonna come build there. We need investments in order to start giving jobs”, and “obviously we’re working very closely with the Israelis to figure out a way to de-escalation, and the next phase is working with Hamas on demilitarization.”
The first meeting of the “Board of Peace”, in a hugely contentious location
On February 19, the day after the beginning of Ramadan, Trump convened the first meeting of the “Board of Peace”, which, since its establishment the month before, had expanded way beyond its initial remit of dealing with Gaza to become another Trump vanity project, an alternative to the UN, led by Trump himself in a lifelong unelected role, and which he promptly invited his favourite autocratic leaders to join — including Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and his devoted far-right fanboys, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Argentina’s President Javier Milei. For those wishing to gain particular influence, Trump offered membership for a payment of $1 billion.
When the “Board of Peace” convened, its initial meeting, ironically, took place in the former headquarters of the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., an independent non-governmental organization established by Congress, which Trump illegally dissolved last year, when he fired most of the the institute’s staff, and renamed it the Donald J. Trump US Institute of Peace. As the Associated Press noted, “its name and status remain in legal limbo”, after a US judge ruled that the institute was “not subject to executive branch control and that the takeover was illegal.”
As the AP added, “Enforcement of that decision was put on hold after the government appealed”, but George Foote, the counsel for former USIP leadership and staff, made clear that Trump’s takeover was unacceptable, stating, in no uncertain terms, “A stay is not permission for the loser of a case to hijack the property of the winning party. The government does not have a license to rename the USIP headquarters building or lease it out for ten years. It certainly has no right to open the building to a new international organization like the proposed Board of Peace.”
After this darkly hilarious start, which neatly encapsulated how Trump sees his power as being without any constraint whatsoever — and particularly not from either Congress or the courts, the traditional checks on dangerously unfettered executive power — the first meeting of the Board of Peace was largely a farcical recreation of some scene from the distant past: an unhinged dictator receiving tributes from his devoted followers. As the autocrats, those seeking to curry favor with Trump, and the Gulf and Muslim countries determined to maintain influence over the “peace process” gathered as members, almost no western countries had agreed to join, although many sent along representatives as observers.
Rambling, revelations and projections at the first “Board of Peace” meeting
Trump himself rambled on for nearly an hour at the start of the meeting, then his acolytes queued up to praise him for his vision and his leadership and his commitment to peace. Most of these tributes generically enthused about the wonderful opportunities offered by the techno-futuristic visions for a “New Gaza” laid out by Kushner a month before, pretending that they offered a rosy future for both Israel and the Palestinians, even though only one Palestinian was present at the meeting — Ali Shaath, the Palestinian technocrat appointed to lead the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the Palestinian committee tasked with the day-to-day running of Gaza.
In the limited time available to him, Ali Shaath punctured these rosy visions with a description of the reality on the ground, declaring, “We are operating in extremely difficult conditions Large parts of the Gaza Strip are severely damaged. Destroyed, actually. Humanitarian needs are acute. Law and order remain fragile. This is not a normal operating environment.”
There were also, from the wealthy outsiders making up the Board’s investor-led focus on Gaza, moments of darkness and hilarity — for the latter, Jared Kushner declaring, of his fellow Board members, that “A lot of these people are volunteers. They’re doing this not for any personal gain. People are not personally profiting from this. They’re really doing this for their children and for their grandchildren and because they want to see peace.”
For the former, the demonic-looking war criminal Tony Blair completely ignored Israel’s long economic strangulation of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by declaring, “For decades, Gaza’s governance has been characterized by extremism, corruption, ineffective institutions, and the complete absence of a route to prosperity for the Gazan people.”
Most revealing, as Drop Site News explained, was the revelation that the entire reconstruction plan had first been conceived of in the earliest days of Israel’s genocide, soon after October 7, by Yakir Gabay, an Israeli-Cypriot real estate billionaire. In a post on X, they cited a report in the Jerusalem Post explaining that, “within days of the Oct. 7 attacks, Gabay began drafting the reconstruction plan that now underpins the US Board of Peace framework.”
In other words, even as the most apocalyptic destruction was first raining down on Gaza, a cynical “visionary” investor — “known for [his] close ties to Jared Kushner”, “the son of former Justice Ministry Director-General Meir Gabay”, and the founder of “Aroundtown SA, a Frankfurt-listed real estate giant with a roughly $30 billion portfolio where he is currently Deputy Chairman of the Advisory Board” — breezily ignored the fact that he was witnessing a genocide, saw instead an abundant real estate opportunity, and then began, with the help of his good friend Jared Kushner, to seek out similarly-minded opportunists to make his grotesque plan a reality.
At the meeting, as Drop Site News described it, “Gabay laid out a 10-year plan to turn Gaza into a ‘Mediterranean Riviera’ with 200 hotels and possibly artificial islands”, a proposal that also “includes schools, hospitals, factories, agriculture, rail lines, water and energy plants, tech hubs, sports facilities, plus a seaport and airport.” He also “cited the need to clear 70 million tons of rubble and miles of tunnels, projecting ‘hundreds of thousands of jobs’ under a ‘free economy’ model backed by a Gaza sovereign fund”, although he stressed that all of the proposed development “depends on the complete disarmament of Hamas.”
Also chillingly notable was the presentation by Liran Tancman, a former Israeli Intelligence Corps official and a co-founder of the Israeli Cyber Command, who was also one of the founders of the reviled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the joint Israeli-US aid distribution system, established last year in an attempt to usurp the UN and established international aid agencies, which shocked the world when desperate, starving Palestinians were regularly shot at and killed by those who were supposed to be providing them with aid.
According to the pan-Arab news platform Daraj Media, Tancman has long pressed for Palestinian aid to be dependent on biometric vetting, having first put forward these proposals in 2015, and in his presentation he enthused about the development of a “cashless society” of total digital control, from which, of course, anyone regarded as unwanted, for whatever reason, could be completely cut off from all economic activity — a scenario of “blackmail and pacification”, as described by the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada, for which, if he gets his way, Gaza will be a testing ground for the digital “cashless societies” that big tech authoritarians and pliant politicians want to introduce throughout the rest of the world.
Because of his explicit connections with the Israeli intelligence services, and, essentially, techno-warfare, Tancman was, apparently, understandably reluctant to speak publicly at the meeting, but was pressed to do so by Kushner, who, in his presentation, made a point of exposing how Tancman had asked him, “Are you sure I should be presenting? I’m a Jewish Israeli, and I’m working on Gaza and all these things.” Kushner stated that he had replied, “That’s exactly why you should be presenting today”, adding, “If Jews and Muslims work together, Israelis and Palestinians with Americans and English and Bulgarian and people from all around the world, then we can join on a common goal, which is peace and togetherness.”
The $1 billion donors
At the meeting, Trump also bragged about how nine of the members of the “Board of Peace” — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Morocco, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan — had pledged a total of $7 billion towards the reconstruction of Gaza, although only Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait confirmed their pledges at the meeting, while Azerbaijan noted that, although its “participation in investment projects in Gaza through the Peace Summit may be considered,” its “participation is not envisaged in the financial project for Gaza in the amount of 7 billion US dollars announced at today’s session.”
Trump also pledged that the US would contribute $10 billion, although, typically, gave no sign of how that money would be raised, as, yet again, he is operating without any Congressional oversight or approval. He also claimed that the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs would provide $2 billion for humanitarian aid, although that seems to refer to the $2 billion that he pledged to provide to the UN for humanitarian aid in December, which was, in turn, just a fraction of its previous support, and was accompanied by an aggressive message from the State Department that the UN must “adapt, shrink or die”, a message delivered as it also announced the US’s withdrawal from dozens of UN agencies.
Trump also spent some time praising the $175 million donation from FIFA, for sports-related projects, via its president, Gianni Infantino, who was in attendance and made a presentation, and who, last year, attracted widespread condemnation when he invented a FIFA Peace Prize and gave it to Trump.
This was the last straw in a career of capitulation in which he has, shamefully, refused all calls for Israel to be banned from all international football events, having killed over 800 athletes in Gaza, including over 420 footballers, and having destroyed all the sporting facilities that he now wants to replace. As with Eurovision and the Olympics, the hypocrisy of these who support Israel is in marked contrast to the speed with which Russian was banned from all sporting and entertainment events after its invasion of Ukraine four years ago.
Regarding expenditure, Marc Rowan, the CEO of the asset management firm Apollo Global Management, and another key player in the “Board of Peace”, enthused about the value of Gaza — noting that “the coastline alone” represented “$50 billion of value on a conservative basis”, and that the “housing stock” that would be built — 100,000 homes in Rafah, initially, followed by 400,000 more homes eventually — represented “more than $30 billion as rebuilt”, plus “more than $30 billion” for the infrastructure. As he declared, triumphantly, “$115 billion of value. It just needs to be unlocked and financed.”
Regarding the administration of these reconstruction funds, Ajay Banga, the president of the World Bank, and another key player in the “Board of Peace”, sought to reassure the global audience that all of the investment money being pledged and delivered was in safe hands. In his presentation, he noted that, after the UN Security Council passed a resolution supporting Trump’s “Peace Plan” in November, “we set about creating the Gaza Reconstruction and Development Fund at the World Bank. It’s housed there.”
He added, “The World Bank’s role is that of a limited trustee. We manage the donor contributions coming in … and then we help to manage that money while it stays with us, and under the direction of the Board of Peace, we disperse the money for reconstruction and development projects in Gaza.”
He also described three particular contributions that “the World Bank Group can bring to the table”, stating, “The first is leveraging of public finance. Because of our AAA rating, we have the ability to leverage private bond money to help to create the resources we need to do what Marc just talked about. The second is we can de-risk private investing, and the third is we have people on the ground and expertise and knowledge of doing this kind of work in other markets.”
Also revealed at the meeting were developments regarding the establishment of the International Stablilization Force, which, initially, no one wanted to be involved with because of fears that, instead of being peacekeepers, they would be drawn into conflict with Hamas. An additional complication was Trump’s refusal to even consider using US troops, unreasonably putting the burden on other countries.
Despite this, at the meeting, Maj. Gen. Jasper Jeffers, in charge of implementing the ISF, announced that five countries have now agreed to provide troops — Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and Albania — and that each country will be responsible for one of five sectors into which Gaza has been divided, with two other countries, Egypt and Jordan, having offered to train the police, and with Indonesia having been appointed to the position of deputy commander for the ISF. The aim in the long term, as he described it, is the establishment of forces of 12,000 police and 20,000 ISF soldiers.
An infographic showing the planned deployment of troops in Gaza working as members of the International Stablilization Force.So where do we stand regarding the disarmament of Hamas?
The burning question, as the Palestinians continue with their poignant Ramadan celebrations, is whether or not any viable route exists whereby Hamas will hand over control — and its weapons — to a Palestinian authority. The presumptive nominee, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), has, outrageously, not even been allowed to enter Gaza yet by its Israeli gatekeepers, and Israel continues to cling to the only course of action it lives for anymore: how to resume its barbaric slaughter of the Palestinian people under the guise of finally eradicating Hamas.
At the “Board of Peace” meeting, the official Israeli attendee, foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar sounded noticeably fanatical in contrast to the billionaire developers’s smooth platitudes. After thanking Trump as “a leader who takes initiative, forges new paths and works toward a better future for the entire world”, he spoke of Hamas as having “built the largest terror state in the world — with huge terror infrastructure, above and below ground”, lied about atrocities committed on October 7, and then proceeded to claim that “all previous plans for Gaza failed because they never addressed the core issues: terror, hate, incitement and indoctrination.”
As he then stated, “At the heart of President Trump’s comprehensive plan are the disarmament of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, and deradicalization of Palestinian society there.”
“Hamas must be disarmed”, he continued. “That includes all its weapons; its terror infrastructure, underground tunnel network and weapons production facilities must all be dismantled.” He also insisted that “there must also be a fundamental deradicalization process”, and that “the infrastructure that indoctrinates Palestinian children to hate and kill Jews, in educational and religious institutions, should no longer exist”, ignoring, as ever, cause and effect; namely, that the Palestinian resistance explicitly doesn’t indoctrinate its children to hate and kill Jews, unlike Israeli society and its engrained dehumanization and hatred of the Palestinians, which it inculcates in its children from an early age.
As the clock ticks on disarmament, the Times of Israel reported on January 16 that Israeli Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs, at a conference in Jerusalem, “threatened to renew the genocidal war on Gaza if Hamas failed to disarm in 60 days”, as Al Jazeera described it, a threat that was batted away by Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi, who said that he “had no knowledge of such a demand”, and that, in any case, such statements “are merely threats with no basis in the ongoing negotiations.”
Fuchs, for his part, “claimed that the two-month period was requested by the United States administration” and that “we are respecting that.” This may, however, merely be projection of the part of the Israelis. Trump himself threatened Hamas at the “Board of Peace” meeting, but without laying down a specific deadline. “Hamas, I think they are going to give up their weapons which is what they promised”, he lied, adding, “If they don’t, they will be very harshly met.”
The problem for everyone is that the resumption of Israel’s genocide would be horrendous for everyone involved. For Israel, it would, I predict, finally confirm that it must be thoroughly isolated as a repugnant pariah state, for the Palestinians it is unthinkable, for Trump it would be a humiliating defeat for his bizarre self-perception as the greatest peacemaker who ever lived, and for the various predatory real estate billionaires and their hangers-on, like Tony Blair, it would dash their greedy dreams of the billions to be made from Gaza’s re-development.
The only answer, then, is negotiation, just as Hamas has always insisted, and as, I suspect, most of the Muslim negotiators in the long quest for peace also recognize. Hamas and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza need to be allowed to arrange for a handover of power and weapons, and the NCAG needs to be empowered to drive regeneration through autonomy, as the only vehicle that can deliver a lasting peace. For this, Israel must accept that its unforgivable days of endless bloodlust and its religiously-mandated expansion are over, and the billionaire investors must walk back from their rank visions of a techno-futuristic “Riviera” devoid of any meaningful Palestinian presence.
No other solution can bring the peace that all parties claim to want, and any alternative course of action will only expose the truth behind their masks: on the one hand, on Israel’s part, the most grotesque enthusiasm for genocide that any of us have seen in our lifetimes, and, on the other, the repulsive greed of the western investors who only ever see the world through the prism of dollar signs.