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Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will meet in Washington DC on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, as major European allies declined to join the group and criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate.
The White House has indicated that the summit for his new ad hoc council at the renamed Donald J Trump Institute of Peace will heavily function as a fundraising round, with Trump announcing on social media that countries have pledged more than $5bn toward rebuilding Gaza, which has been devastated in the war with Israel and remains in a humanitarian crisis.
The US president claimed that the member states had also “committed thousands of personnel to the International Stabilization Force and Local Police to maintain Security and Peace for Gazans”.
The board was initially formed with the reconstruction of Gaza as its stated primary goal, though its mandate has since been widened by Trump to include responding to other global conflicts.
But, despite Trump’s characteristic bombast, the Board of Peace summit will open to heavy scepticism, with expectations limited both for Thursday’s meeting in Washington and in the Middle East, where the 100-day peace and recovery plan announced by Jared Kushner in Davos has stalled and aid into Gaza remains at a trickle.
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former US diplomat, said that the Board of Peace would have difficulty resolving the key questions in the Israel-Gaza conflict: who will govern the territory, who will provide security on the ground, and how to deal with the immediate needs of the Palestinian population. There also was little indication how a Board of Peace could break a key deadlock in negotiations between Israel and Hamas, he added.
“The board is a convenient way for a president who’s interested in quick wins, transactions and a lot of motion in lieu of serious movement as a way to project that things are somehow … not dead,” he said, referring to diplomacy. “So you could get some impressive pledges. But pledges are one thing, delivering is another.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has declined her invitation, and the leaders of key US allies including the United Kingdom, Germany and France have also said they won’t join the Board of Peace. Trump rescinded an invitation to Canada’s Mark Carney following a critical speech by the Canadian prime minister at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.
The White House initiative received another blow this week as Pope Leo XIV announced that the Vatican would not join the board, which critics have said is an attempt to usurp authority from other major international organisations including the United Nations and may allow Trump to remain as its chair even after his presidency ends.
“One concern,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s top diplomat, “is that at the international level it should above all be the [United Nations] that manages these crisis situations. This is one of the points on which we have insisted.”
The meeting instead will be attended by Middle Eastern delegations, including from Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Qatar, along with a bevy of international states with little direct engagement in the conflict in Gaza, from Argentina and Paraguay to Hungary to Kazakhstan. Many are seen as currying favor with the Trump administration by joining the Board of Peace – which proposes securing a permanent seat for a $1bn donation – in an effort to prop up his latest signature initiative.
Max Rodenbeck, the Israel/Palestine project director for the International Crisis Group, said that the initiative would be under heavy scrutiny and that there was “huge global scepticism about the shape and intentions of the Board of Peace”.
“If this meeting does not result in fast, tangible improvements on the ground – and particularly on the humanitarian front – its credibility will quickly crumble,” he said.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who signed up to the idea during a visit to Washington last week, has chosen to skip the meeting. The foreign minister, Gideon Saar, a rightwing ally of Netanyahu, will attend instead.
Winning Israeli cooperation with the peace plan is expected to be extremely hard in an election year when Netanyahu is trying to hold on to the extreme far-right wing of his party and wants to avoid the perception of working alongside regional powers like Qatar or Turkey, which have close links to Hamas.
Developments on the ground have indicated that few of the political or security organisations under the Trump-backed peace plan have actually made progress toward resolving the conflict or easing Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.
Nearly a month on from the unveiling of the 100-day peace and recovery plan by Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law, the people designated to carry out that plan are still hazy about how it is supposed to work.
Fifteen members of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a body of technocrats established under Trump’s plan, are waiting in Cairo, anxious to show rapid improvements in living standards to the people of Gaza, but lack the tools to get anything done.
Nickolay Mladenov, who is supposed to act as the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, has had little visibility so far and said even less about his role. The NCAG’s first major post on social media, put up on Saturday, suggested a degree of frustration, and a message that it was not willing to be a puppet.
“We emphasize that full administrative, civilian, and police control by the NCAG is not merely procedural; [the] NCAG cannot be expected to carry responsibility without the full administrative, civilian, and police powers necessary to implement its mandate effectively,” the NCAG post on X said.
“Everything is going slower than expected, and everyone is very frustrated,” said Gershon Baskin, an Israeli commentator and peace activist who played a role in negotiating the peace plan.
“The NCAG are staying in Cairo until they have a clear understanding that they can achieve something. Going to Gaza now would be very unconstructive. They would not be able to achieve anything,” Baskin said. They don’t even know what their budget is, how much money they have to work with and what their tasks are going to be. It’s not even clear to them under whose authority they’re working.”
There are some moves towards building an international stabilisation force (ISF) envisaged in the Trump plan as a support to the Palestinian police. Indonesia has already offered 8,000 troops; a barracks site is being prepared for them inside Gaza and there is reportedly an office at a civil-military coordination centre with “ISF” on the door. But no one is inside.
Diplomats in Jerusalem are worried that the ISF plan will be doomed to failure if the right conditions are not created for its deployment, which include a feasible plan for Hamas disarmament and IDF withdrawal.
Aid into Gaza remains severely limited, and, in a key obstacle to any reconstruction efforts, there has been no change in the highly restrictive list of “dual-use” items that are banned, which include almost anything made of metal, including metal tent poles.
“Israel is continuing to encroach on Gaza territory with the yellow line going further west. People are still being killed, buildings are still being demolished,” said Sam Rose, the acting Gaza director of the UN relief agency, Unrwa. “It seems we’ve kind of fallen into a pattern of managing the conflict, or managing the post-conflict, in a way we never thought we would.”
