Khaled Abu Jarrar, a 58-year-old Palestinian from Beit Hanoon, now shelters in Gaza City’s former Legislative Council building—one of thousands of structures repurposed as displacement camps after Israel’s genocidal assault reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble. His wife was recently diagnosed with liver cancer. She needs urgent treatment abroad, but the Rafah crossing remains sealed.
As international powers announce frameworks and phases, Abu Jarrar watches the gap between diplomatic language and ground reality: “In the media, they talk about withdrawals and reconstruction, but on the ground, the bombing continues from the north and the south, and things seem even more complicated… On the ground, the shelling never stops.”
This gap—between the lived reality of Palestinians in Gaza and the geopolitical frameworks imposed upon them—defines the current moment. On one side stands the so-called Board of Peace, a US-led body designed to assert Western control over Gaza’s reconstruction and governance. On the other, Palestinians themselves have formed a technocratic committee, supported across factional lines, attempting to deliver services and preserve unity under catastrophic conditions. Understanding this moment requires holding both realities simultaneously: the imperial architecture of the Board of Peace, and the Palestinian political sophistication navigating within and against it.
The Gaza Peace Board: Imperial Trusteeship by Design
The so-called “Board of Peace” was established through UN Security Council Resolution 2803, adopted on 17 November 2025 (what one former director of the New York UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office describedas a “day of shame.” The resolution was drafted by the United States and passed with 13 votes in favor, zero against, with China and Russia abstaining. This voting pattern reveals the stark geopolitical contradictions of the contemporary international order.
Critically, eight Arab and Muslim-majority countries issued a joint statement supporting the US draft before the vote: Qatar, Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, and Turkey. This endorsement provided essential political cover that made opposition politically untenable for other Council members. China and Russia abstained rather than vetoed, signaling discomfort with the framework while respecting Palestinian decisions made under catastrophic conditions.
The resolution establishes two main mechanisms: the Board of Peace as “a transitional administration with an international legal personality”, and an International Stabilization Force (ISF) authorized to “use all necessary measures” to demilitarize Gaza, decommission weapons from non-state armed groups, and secure borders. The ISF will operate “in close consultation and cooperation” with Israel and Egypt, with Israeli withdrawal conditional on “standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization” that Israel helps determine.
The Board’s imperial ambitions extend far beyond Gaza.While Resolution 2803 limits the Board’s mandate to Gaza until December 2027, the Board of Peace charter itself—sent to dozens of world leaders invited to join—makes no mention of Gaza. Instead, it establishes “an international organization that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” The charter’s preamble starts off with criticizing existing institutions that “have too often failed” and calls for “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body”—language revealing Trump's vision of the Board as a US-led alternative to the United Nations for managing global conflicts.
The charter explicitly names Trump—not aU.S. President—as Chairman and grants him unprecedented unilateral power: he alone decides which states to invite (architect of the illegal Iraq War, Tony Blair was one of the first invited board member), holds final approval over all decisions despite nominal majority voting, and can remove member states. Most brazenly, the charter requires countries to pay $1 billion in cash for permanent membership, while others serve renewable three-year terms at the Chairman’s discretion. This pay-to-play structure transforms “peace-building” into a mechanism for wealthy states to purchase influence in interventions serving US strategic interests and a source of funding for Trump’s machinations globally.
An Obscenity Wrapped in the Language of Peace
That Trump chairs this body and proposes Blair as a member is obscene. Blair’s “Institute for Global Change” has marketed the same formula throughout the Global South: disempower popular movements, install amenable administrators, open markets to Western corporations, call it “development.” His involvement in Gaza follows this script exactly.
The framework treats Palestinian self-determination as something to be granted by Washington and London—contingent on Palestinian compliance with Western-Israeli security demands. It demands a “non-militarized Palestinian state” while leaving intact the regional military apparatus that just devastated Gaza. It calls for technical, apolitical Palestinian governance—code for excluding Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Islamic Jihad from any political role.
As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated, Resolution 2803 “runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination, consolidates Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including ongoing unlawful policies and practices, and therefore risks legitimating ongoing mass violence.” Unlike UN administrations in East Timor or Kosovo, this framework imposes governance without Palestinian consent and makes sovereignty conditional on benchmarks determined by the occupying power.
The National Committee for Gaza Management: Unity Under Impossible Conditions
Yet, whilst Hamas, the PFLP, and Islamic Jihad have rejected this foreign “guardianship”, Palestinians must survive the devastation wrought by Israel’s genocidal war—over 70,000 dead, 90 percent displaced, infrastructure almost entirely destroyed. “The situation in Gaza is beyond difficult,” explained 49-year-old Mohammad, who lives in a stairwell in a crumbling destroyed building with his wife, Asmaa Manoun. “We can barely manage. For many months, we haven’t received aid, food parcels, or tents. Things are chaotic, and Israel is interested in this chaos, and in using aid as punishment.”
It is within this reality that the National Committee for Gaza Management (NCGA). Under 15-member Palestinian technocratic committee headed by Ali Abdel Hamid Shaath, a former Deputy Minister of Planning and former chair of the Palestinian Industrial Estates Authority—was established. The Palestinian Authority backed it. Hamas affirmed its readiness to hand over administration and facilitate the committee’s humanitarian mission. However, Resolution 2803 subordinates the NCGA to the Board of Peace, with Bulgarian former Defense Minister Mladenov overseeing the committee. This creates the fundamental contradiction: Palestinians selected the NCGA to govern Gaza’s daily affairs, but it operates under a colonial framework designed to defer self-determination indefinitely.
Yet, the unity is significant. Unlike 2006, when Hamas’s electoral victory led to Western-backed isolation and internal Palestinian division, 2026 finds all major factions cooperating. In July 2024, fourteen Palestinian factions signed the Beijing Declaration in China, committing to form an interim national unity government and end Gaza-West Bank division. They understand that factional antagonisms under current conditions serve only the occupier.
Abu Jarrar’s situation—and that of millions more—captures the impossible position Palestinians face. He needs the committee to succeed, to open the Rafah crossing, to create conditions where his wife can receive treatment. Yet he is acutely aware of how Israeli actions contradict diplomatic announcements. Hamas, PFLP, and Islamic Jihad reject “foreign guardianship” while recognizing that Palestinian children need food, hospitals need medicine, and homes need to be reconstructed. Their pragmatic cooperation does not legitimize the Board, it demonstrates political maturity in distinguishing between survival imperatives and strategic objectives.
This is the dialectic we must understand: Palestinians working within an unjust framework while maintaining commitment to transcending it, cooperating tactically while opposing strategically.
What This Moment Represents
The NCGA’s formation with support from Hamas, Fatah, the PFLP, and Islamic Jihad marks a shift. This unity complicates Western-Israeli strategy: Netanyahu welcomed Resolution 2803 for demanding “full demilitarization, disarmament, and deradicalization of Gaza”—language criminalizing Palestinian political plurality. Yet Palestinians from across the political spectrum have tactically accepted the “technocratic” committee as Palestinians governing Gaza’s daily affairs within imposed constraints, rather than ceding administration entirely to external actors.
The NCGA represents neither liberation nor capitulation, but Palestinians navigating catastrophic constraints with political nuance. Whilst opposing the Resolution 2803, pressure should simultaneously be mounted to hold its implementation accountable, as Albanese urged, in a manner “consistent with binding international law” rather than treating Board oversight as legitimate governance. Resolution 2803 authorizes the Board until December 2027—Palestinian civil society emphasizes using this period to strengthen institutions capable of full sovereignty when the mandate ends. As Shaath stated, the NCGA’s mandate is to “embrace peace” through which they can build the foundations “to secure the path to true Palestinian rights and self-determination.”
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This article was produced by Globetrotter. Mikaela Nhondo Erskog is a member of the No Cold War collective. She is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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