Trump's Board of Peace built a mirage while Gaza starved
By Aoife Gallagher · Reporting from Dublin ·
A year after the ceasefire began, Donald Trump's Board of Peace has delivered no reconstruction, leaving Israel to expand military control while the people of Gaza starve behind an empty diplomatic mirage.
A pay-to-play project built for show
When Donald Trump proposed his Board of Peace, it was sold to a weary world as a fresh start. A United Nations Security Council resolution recognized it as a transitional administration. Member states duly paid a one-billion-dollar annual fee to join. Those states had pledged seven billion dollars in funding. Aid agencies estimated reconstruction costs at closer to seventy billion. According to Al Jazeera, scholars point out that this pay-to-play structure created an autocratically controlled vehicle centered on Trump as chairman for life, bypassing multilateral institutions in favor of personal executive fiat.
History offers a bitter rhyme here. Just as the Oslo Accords used interim agreements and transitional governing bodies to create a facade of Palestinian autonomy while the occupying power maintained actual security and territorial control, the Board of Peace operates as a glittering diplomatic theater. The strongest opposing case for the board is that any diplomatic framework is better than total war. Securing the release of the remaining living captives—all 168 of whom Hamas has freed—justifies the experiment. But that defense collapses against the facts. A diplomatic architecture that extracts billions in entrance fees while failing to secure basic protection for civilians is not a peace process. It is a protection racket for the powerful.
Starvation by design under a yellow line
The human cost of this institutional failure is staggering. NPR reports that there is no reconstruction in Gaza. Palestinians have been squeezed near the sea's edge. Israel currently occupies approximately sixty percent of the territory, with the military expanding its control according to NPR, marked by physical barriers like the yellow blocks used in Bureij. Al Jazeera notes that approximately 1,400 Palestinians, primarily women and children, have been killed since the ceasefire began. That brings the death toll to more than 74,000 since the war started.
The Board of Peace promised that food would flood into the ruined territory, yet hunger remains widespread. While increased food entry has reversed starvation across parts of Gaza, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification hunger monitor notes that aid trucks enter daily, far below the target. France 24 highlights the daily desperation of civilians like Niyaha al-Masri, a mother who spends hours queueing at a community kitchen. Meanwhile, Israel has restricted the flow of dual-use items, including tents and ventilators. It banned international aid organizations from bringing in staff or aid. As Mohamad Elmasry of the Doha Institute of Graduate Studies told Al Jazeera, Israel is continuing a policy of ethnic cleansing by design, making life miserable while international actors refuse to cross Washington.
Sidelining the helpers to secure the spoils
True to form, the Board of Peace has turned its guns not on the occupying forces but on the humanitarian safety net itself. Last month, the board announced it will not work with the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. An official told The Associated Press that UNRWA's days are over. This comes despite the UN General Assembly voting in June to extend the agency's mandate until 2029. It comes despite an International Court of Justice ruling that Israeli restrictions and allegations against the agency were unsubstantiated. European nations have opposed these attempts to replace the UN. But small nations survive on rules the big ones would rather ignore, and here the United States holds the leverage.
Simon Mabon, a professor at Lancaster University, told Al Jazeera that the board has failed, noting that its impotence has allowed the genocide to continue. The board's proposed international stabilization force, led by CENTCOM and staffed by nations like Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Albania, Kosovo, and Uganda, remains a paper tiger without a deployment. Hamas has dissolved its civilian administration and agreed to hand weapons over to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. But it rejects total disarmament while Israeli forces continue their attacks and refuse to withdraw. The NCAG itself operates from Cairo because Israel has not granted it entry into the Strip.
One year on, the Board of Peace stands exposed as a cruel mirage that traded human lives for executive vanity. It leaves the people of Gaza to starve behind an expanding wall of steel and sand.