The Gaza Board of Peace and Trump’s strategy What experts say

Next week, US President Donald Trump will announce the establishment of the Gaza Board of Peace as part of the second phase of the ceasefire agreement.

According to Axios, citing reliable sources, the Board will be chaired personally by President Trump. The body will oversee the formation of a Palestinian technocratic government and monitor the process of postwar reconstruction in the Gaza Strip.

Among the proposed participants are the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and Türkiye. U.S. officials note that the final configuration of the plan may change depending on developments in other foreign policy areas, including the situation around Venezuela and negotiations on resolving the Russian–Ukrainian conflict. The Board of Peace representative on the ground will be former UN envoy to the Middle East Nikolay Mladenov, who has already held a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

How do experts assess the prospects of the Board of Peace? Foreign political analysts share their views with Caliber.Az.

Professor of philosophy and analyst at the World Zionist Organisation, Alexander Osovtsov, believes that Donald Trump’s initiative to establish a Board of Peace currently appears, to put it mildly, not entirely logical.

“At present, the fate of Trump’s plan for Gaza does not depend on the creation of a Board of Peace, but primarily on the disarmament of Hamas, which is one of the key conditions in the U.S. president’s plan. However, this is not being observed at the moment. Moreover, Donald Trump himself recently issued an ultimatum to Hamas, giving it two months to demilitarise, adding that if they do not disarm, ‘all hell will break out in the Middle East.’ Of course, I would be glad if the movement’s militants were to comply with the White House chief’s conditions, but such guarantees apparently do not exist. Otherwise, there would have been no need for such an ultimatum,” he said.

According to him, a strange situation is emerging: if a Board of Peace is established in January and certain decisions are made, then by late February or early March, the deadline of Trump’s ultimatum will expire, and there is a possibility of a resumption of hostilities should Hamas refuse to comply with the stipulated conditions.

“This is a very illogical sequence of moves. The Board of Peace is a good, appealing name, and Mr. Mladenov is a very solid choice — Israelis know him and treat him with great respect. But in order to build peace, the aggressor must first be deprived of the ability to carry out aggression, not the other way around. As an example, Trump did not attempt to manage Venezuelan oil before the U.S. armed forces demonstrated their capabilities in Venezuela. That would have been highly illogical. Yet for some reason, a different logic seems to apply to Gaza,” Osovtsev stated.

American journalist and political analyst Andrey Becker believes that President Trump’s actions are always calculated down to the smallest detail, and that the launch of the Board of Peace mechanism with the participation of other countries as early as January conceals a well-thought-out strategy.

“Trump always plays several games in parallel rather than pursuing a strictly linear tactic in the spirit of traditional American conservative policy, where moves were typically made step by step: depending on the effectiveness of a strategy in one direction, the next would be launched, or it would simply be abandoned. Trump saves time and resources; he is a master at exploiting contradictions, and this situation is no exception. The U.S. president is testing the waters, fully aware that the Board will not become operational overnight — it will take time for it to function fully. It is quite expected that disagreements will begin to emerge among participants within this new international structure, as it brings together a very heterogeneous group of actors. Regardless of how the situation in Gaza unfolds, Trump needs to activate this mechanism now to use it to start influencing all parties to the conflict.

The White House chief’s calculation also rests on turning Qatar and Türkiye into active members of the Board and using their influence to pressure Hamas. As a result, the movement will be forced to choose between two paths: disarming ‘the soft way,’ with the mediation of the more sympathetic actors — Qatar and Türkiye — or ‘the hard way,’ under military pressure from the United States and Israel. In any scenario, the Board of Peace will continue to function and coordinate developments on the ground, while its international composition will make it possible to legitimise virtually any decision on Gaza, even the most radical ones.

Clearly, Hamas must, in one form or another, be formally dissolved. However, its militants may well be offered an alternative. What, for instance, would prevent them from joining the ranks of existing radical organisations in the Middle East, or — more likely — from establishing an entirely new structure? The key would simply be to change the name, carry out a cynical rebranding, and relocate. I believe that behind the scenes, for several months now, a form of bargaining has been underway on this very issue between Hamas representatives and mediators represented by Qatar and Türkiye on the one hand, and representatives of the United States and other countries on the other,” Becker concluded.