The peace Donald Trump claims to have brought to Gaza has yet to materialize.
The president’s “Board of Peace,” which vowed to help rebuild the war-ravaged territory, has quietly scaled back its promised reconstruction effort. Instead, the board now plans to build a small, temporary camp governed by a Palestinian administration for a fraction of Gaza’s roughly 2 million displaced residents, The Guardian reported Thursday.
The initiative is a far cry from the board’s original, sweeping vision, which called for the entire territory to be placed under a Palestinian-run administration.
Additionally, even that dramatically scaled-back plan appears to have stalled. Satellite images of the site in southern Gaza where the camp is reportedly slated to be built show nothing but rubble left behind by the war, according to The Guardian. The outlet also reported that the pilot plan is unlikely to be implemented before the end of the year.
Six months after announcing his Board of Peace, Trump has little to show for it. In January, he vowed that the group, which countries could join by contributing $1 billion, would be “one of the most consequential bodies ever created in the history of the world.”
At the time, members included Azerbaijan, Israel, Qatar, and Bahrain. Nine countries later pledged more than $9 billion toward a Gaza “relief package” for the war-torn territory following years of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. By May, however, the Board of Peace’s World Bank-backed fund still had not received any substantial donor funding, The Financial Times reported.
Perhaps the lack of funds stems from the reality that Trump hasn’t actually ushered peace into Gaza. Israel has frequently violated the ceasefire brokered by Trump’s Middle East wonderboys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Just Thursday, at least five Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera and Reuters reported. Israel has also continued to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
These are just a few examples underscoring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued defiance of Trump, who has grown frustrated with the foreign leader amid their ongoing dispute over Iran—another instance in which peace has proved elusive for the president.
While Trump has proudly touted a ceasefire, there was an intense exchange of fire over the weekend despite the so-called peace deal. On Monday, Washington and Tehran both insisted that they alone control the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil is transported.
During his failed campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize last year, the president falsely and repeatedly claimed to have solved seven, eight, and even nine conflicts—and continued to do so after the Norwegian Nobel Committee snubbed him for the world’s most coveted award.
At least the president has consoled himself by saying he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of peace” after not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in November. He does not appear to have changed his stance, despite seizing the coveted award from exiled Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado earlier this year.
