As Trump’s Board of Peace Is Officially Launched, Is the Gaza War Truly Over?

President Trump extolled the triumph of prosperity over violence and highlighted $6.5 billion pledges to rebuild Gaza at the inaugural meeting of his 40-country Board of Peace Thursday. Yet are Gazans ready to end their war on Israel? “We have two countries that want to go in and do a number on Hamas,” Mr. Trump told Board members, without specifying. “I hope it’s not going to be necessary, because they made a promise, and they promised me to get rid of their weapons.”Hamas spokesmen, though, claim they never really signed on to Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza, which was endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. All they agreed to, they say, was a cease-fire and “exchange of prisoners,” as they term the release of all Israeli hostages — but not to disarm.In areas of the Strip that Israel has evacuated in accordance to the plan, Hamas is now quickly rebuilding its weapons arsenal and reestablishing control over the population. Its policemen, Hamas insists, would man an armed police force for Gaza.In his speech, Mr. Trump praised at length such pillars of the Board as Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. It took the president’s special envoy Steven Witkoff to finally correct an omission, and praise one Board member with a strong interest in Gaza. “Oh, the Israelis, I forgot,” Mr. Witkoff said after the president concluded his hour-long address. “Prime Minister Netanyahu. Without him, much wouldn’t have been accomplished.”At an Israel Defense Force base near Tel Aviv on Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu made his priorities clear. “There will be no rehabilitation of the Strip before the Strip is demilitarized,” he told newly-commissioned IDF officers. “In short order, Hamas will face a dilemma. It can be disarmed the easy way or the hard way, but it will disarm.”According to Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan, an International Stabilization Force would be tasked with disarmament. “We reaffirm our commitment to contribute a significant number of troops, up to 8000 or more if necessary,” President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia, the largest troop contributor, said.Albania, Kosovo, and Kazakhstan have also “committed troops and police to stabilize Gaza,” Mr. Trump said, while Egyptians and Jordanians will train a newly-formed local policing force. Morocco, too, announced that it would contribute troops.These countries, though, are reportedly making clear that they are reluctant to battle with Hamas. A base for the international force is being built at a Hamas-free area in central Gaza. The force though is more likely to act like United Nations peacekeepers, separating IDF troops from Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters, than to directly confront the terrorists.“Just in the first few hours, we have 2000 people who have applied to join a new transitional Palestinian police force to be formed in Gaza,” the Board’s high commissioner for Gaza, Nikolai Mladenov, said. How many of them, though, would be members of Hamas?In yet another complication, Israel opposes the presence in Gaza of Hamas-backers Qatar and Turkey, two countries that are highly praised by Mr. Trump, who considers President Recep Tayyip Erdogan his personal “friend.” Doha already pledged $1 billion support for rebuilding Gaza, one of the largest Board’s contributors. In his speech, Mr. Trump praised Prime Minister Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani of Qatar. “I always say he needs a public relation agency, because you do so much good and they have you down as evil,” he said. “And you’re not evil. You help us so much and you’re such a good guy.” Prior to October 7, 2023, Israel facilitated finances from Qatar to Gaza. It arrived by a Doha official visit to the Strip with suitcases filled with $100 bills. When these deliveries started, in 2018, a Qatari official told the Sun that the money is tightly accounted for to ensure that it goes to building schools, hospitals, and mosques rather than to arms.Israelis, though, say that Hamas used the funds to fortify attack tunnels and purchase arms. Qatar also spreads Muslim Brotherhood ideology and galvanizes Arab sympathy to Hamas in Gaza. Israelis say that any progress for peace hinges on ending that ideology and Palestinian calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Thanking the president for his friendship to Israel, Mr. Saar noted that in part the Board envisions that in Gaza “there must be a fundamental deradicalization process, the infrastructure that indoctrinates Palestinian children to hate and kill Jews in educational and religious institutes should no longer exist.”

As Trump’s Board of Peace Is Officially Launched, Is the Gaza War Truly Over?

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