Trump's Gaza peace at risk of stagnating with Hamas still armed

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace — set up to secure a durable end to the war in Gaza — will hold its inaugural meeting in Washington on Thursday with multiple barriers to overcome, not least the question of how to disarm Hamas and avert a resumption of full-on conflict.

A ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian group has been in place since October, though frequent clashes have stalled the rehabilitation of the shattered territory. The Hamas-run health ministry says Israeli attacks — which Israel blames on Hamas violating the terms of the deal — have killed more than 600 people since the truce started.

The “vast majority” of Gazans are still living in “rudimentary tents” among the rubble of destroyed towns, the United Nations said this week.

The Trump administration wants to press ahead with the demilitarization and reconstruction of the territory of around 2 million people, though how to go about that is an unanswered question for the U.S. and other nations involved.

“We have different plans and issues on the table, but I think the reality is that all of this needs to move very fast,” Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat named by the White House as the high representative for Gaza, said at the Munich Security Conference on Friday. The risk is “that we’re not going to implement the second phase of the ceasefire but we’re going to go to the second phase of the war.”

Israel says the disarmament of Hamas must come before anything else — and has threatened to restart its military campaign if that doesn’t happen. Yossi Fuchs, a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warned Monday that his country would resume war if the Iran-backed Islamist group didn’t give up its weapons within 60 days.

The Trump administration understands the challenge of demilitarization in the Gaza Strip, but has been encouraged by what ceasefire mediators dealing with Hamas have reported back, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition they not be named. The official said they disagreed with any suggestion that the Gaza peace process had stalled.

A big reason for the event is for Trump to show he’s not an “isolationist” and wants to work with “middle powers” such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and others outside the traditional U.N. system to resolve intractable conflicts, said Brenda Shaffer, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Still, many of the Arab and Muslim countries that have signed up to the plan and even become peace board members, particularly the wealthy Arab states Trump expects to bankroll reconstruction, have different ideas on how to approach the Gaza situation.

They differ over how exactly to disarm Hamas, which is still in charge of roughly half of Gaza despite Israel waging a two-year war to destroy the group, and how soon the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority can be brought into the process, according to several people participating in ongoing discussions. Israel says the PA cannot be part of running Gaza.

Moreover, the funding needed to rebuild the devastated territory is vast. The U.N. has said that could cost $70 billion. On Feb. 15, Trump said $5 billion has been pledged so far.

Complicating the matter even more is that Israel is seeking to advance ownership rights over the West Bank, drawing condemnation from a number of countries involved in the Gaza peace process, including Egypt, Turkey and the UAE. A senior U.N. official on Wednesday called it “gradual de facto annexation.”

“People in Gaza feel the war technically stopped but in fact it’s still ongoing, albeit at a less intense pace,” said Sufyan Abuzayda, a Cairo-based Palestinian academic who was previously a PA minister. “But they have a glimmer of hope and it has to do with President Trump, because they see him as the only one able to take decisions that bind Israel and improve their lot.”

As attempts to resolve the uncertainties continue, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to travel to Israel on Feb. 28 to meet with Netanyahu, according to a State Department official.

Middle Eastern states including the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey see the territorial contiguity of Gaza and the West Bank under one authority and a future Palestinian state as a crucial goal.

Yet Abu Dhabi believes improving the daily lives of Gazans in areas free from the influence of Hamas and other armed groups should take priority, according to people with knowledge of the UAE’s thinking, especially given Israel’s rejection of a Palestinian state.

Anwar Gargash, who serves as the UAE president’s senior diplomatic adviser, said in Munich that the two-state solution and ensuring Israel doesn’t take “irreversible actions” in the West Bank “are all important.”

But “right now the main thing is to bring real improvement to conditions of safety, security and livelihood,” he said.

Saudi Arabia wants the PA to be brought in as quickly as possible, said a person with knowledge of Riyadh’s thinking. The Saudi government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Peacekeeping forces

Persuading countries to commit military personal to a peacekeeping unit — known as the International Stabilization Force — has been another problem. Few countries have signaled they’re willing to send troops into what’s still a highly-volatile territory and none have said they’re prepared to confront Hamas.

Indonesia says it may send as many as 8,000 troops, but adds that they would mainly be engineers and medical personnel.

Italy said it’s ready to train police for Gaza when the right conditions are met. The U.S. has asked Italy to join the ISF as a founding member, people familiar with the matter said last month, though no decision has been forthcoming.

Spain’s Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said in Munich that his country is willing to contribute forces to the ISF only if the PA is “at the center of the whole process.”

There will be an update on the ISF at the Board of Peace meeting, the U.S. official said, without giving any details. The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, the U.K.’s Guardian reported Thursday, citing Board of Peace contracting records.

The UAE, one of the few Arab countries to have forged deep relations with Israel, believes it can use those ties to get the Jewish state to make concessions and stop a return to war.

“On a lot of things we found a middle ground,” the UAE’s Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem Al-Hashimy, who’s on Trump’s Gaza Executive Board, said in an interview, referring to her country’s humanitarian and medical aid to the enclave since the war began in 2023. “We had the ability and bandwidth to move things along.”

But on rebuilding Gaza, little can be achieved without a serious effort to dismantle Hamas’s remaining infrastructure and military capabilities, according to Assaf Orion, a former Israeli army general who is now senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. After that the logistical and funding challenges are immense, he added.

“You need China-scale super heavy lifting,” he said referring to the tens of millions of tons of rubble in Gaza. “Where is the operational mechanism to do this?”

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—With assistance from Dan Williams, Eric Martin, John Harney, Donato Paolo Mancini and Kate Sullivan.