Trump's Board of Peace filed its report to the United Nations Security Council today. The principal obstacle to peace in Gaza, it says, is Hamas. Not the 856 Palestinians killed since October's ceasefire. Not the 60 per cent of Gaza now under Israeli military control, more than the agreement ever permitted. Not the aid restrictions, the struck police stations, the tent camps holding two million people without running water. The obstacle, the report states with diplomatic precision, is Hamas. Specifically, its weapons.
This is the peace plan. Hamas disarms. Israel withdraws. Reconstruction begins. A new Palestinian government forms. Nickolay Mladenov, the Board's lead envoy, has said it plainly: disarmament is 'not negotiable' and every other element of the plan waits behind it. 'Reconstruction cannot commence where weapons have not been laid down.' The sequence is orderly. It is also entirely designed by and for one side.
Consider what has happened while the disarmament argument has been advanced. Since October, Israeli strikes on Gaza have increased by 35 per cent from the month before the ceasefire. Israel now controls 60 per cent of Gaza's territory, more than the agreement allocated. It has struck the police stations a post-ceasefire Palestinian administration would need to function. It has restricted aid to a fraction of what was promised. The Board's own report acknowledges 'near-daily ceasefire violations' with 'human consequences — civilians killed, families living in fear.' That language sits in the same document asking the Security Council to press Hamas to hand over its weapons.
Hamas's refusal is not difficult to understand. It is being asked to disarm while the party it is negotiating against expands its military footprint, breaks the agreement's terms and destroys the infrastructure that any successor government would require. Surrendering the only leverage available, to a party openly violating the agreement that disarmament is supposed to serve, is not a peace process. It is the end of one.
Israel has been explicit about its objectives since October 7, 2023. Every hostage home. Hamas destroyed. The first has been achieved. The Board's disarmament demand is the instrument of the second, packaged in the language of the first. A framework that requires one party to give up its weapons while the other expands its occupation is not a path toward peace. It is a path toward the formalisation of defeat.
The Security Council meets Thursday. It will hear the arguments. It will note the violations on both sides with appropriate gravity. It will change nothing, because the framework it is being asked to endorse was not designed to end the occupation. It was designed to consolidate it under diplomatic cover.
Eight hundred and fifty-six people dead into a ceasefire. Sixty per cent of the territory taken. And the obstacle, according to the Board of Peace, is the side being asked to give up the only thing it has left.
The occupation has a peace plan. The occupied are being asked to fund it.
