Twelve months after the October 10, 2025 ceasefire, the board counts prisoner swaps and donor pledges as wins — while more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed, aid runs at a third of promised levels, and no stabilization force has deployed.
Published 10 October 2026 · 14:19 GMT
One year ago today, on October 10, 2025, a ‘ceasefire’ took hold in Gaza under a 20-point plan championed by United States President Donald Trump — and with it, a new American-led body, the Board of Peace, was handed the job of shepherding the Strip toward reconstruction and, eventually, a ‘credible pathway’ to Palestinian statehood. In November, a United Nations Security Council resolution recognized the board as Gaza’s ‘transitional administration,’ giving Washington’s project the stamp of international legitimacy.
The anniversary has arrived with the guns still firing. People searched the rubble of a collapsed building in Gaza City on October 9 after overnight Israeli airstrikes, and a child was among seven people reported killed by Israel in Gaza on the ceasefire’s anniversary itself — the latest entries in a year of near-daily strikes across the Strip. Rather than relief and rebuilding, Palestinians have faced twelve months of continued attacks and expanding Israeli control inside the territory. That record now defines the board’s first year.
The concrete ledger, as reported by Al Jazeera’s anniversary review: Hamas released all 168 living Israeli captives, and Israel freed Palestinian prisoners under the plan’s exchange terms. Hamas announced the dissolution of its government in the Gaza Strip — a move Israel dismissed as a ‘stunt.’ In February, board members met in Washington for a first summit, pledging $7bn in funding against the roughly $70bn aid agencies say reconstruction will cost; on the sidelines of last month’s UN General Assembly, the board unveiled a 66-project recovery plan worth $2.4bn.
The rest of the ledger is deficit. A National Committee for the Administration of Gaza — the technocratic body meant to govern, led by Chief Commissioner Ali Shaath — was founded but operates from Cairo: Israel has not granted it entry into the Strip and has not said why. About 227 aid trucks enter Gaza daily against the 600 the plan promised, and Israel classifies thousands of basic items, from tents to ventilators, as ‘dual use’ and restricts them. The IPC hunger monitor says about 1.4 million Palestinians — 200,000 more than in May — will suffer hunger until at least December.
We do not know whether the International Stabilization Force will ever materialize. Six countries — Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Albania, Kosovo and Uganda — have committed personnel toward a 20,000-soldier, 12,000-police mission headed by US Central Command, but not a single unit has deployed, and no timeline has been published.
We do not know whether Hamas will disarm. The group has agreed to hand its weapons to the technocratic committee but rejects the plan’s ‘disarmament’ clause while Israel keeps striking and holds ground beyond the agreed lines — and Israel says it will not advance the plan until Hamas disarms. The standoff is circular by design. Nor do we know the true number of missing Palestinians presumed dead under the rubble, or whether the board’s mandate survives its December 2027 review.
The Board of Peace was the first attempt to place Gaza under a standing international transitional authority — a test of whether Washington can convert a signed plan into concrete realities in Gaza, and whether it can hold its closest regional ally to commitments once made. More than two million Palestinians live inside the experiment’s boundaries, and the precedent it sets will shape every future proposal for post-war administration, from Gaza to elsewhere.
It matters financially, too. Member states bought into the board at $1bn a year each, donors pledged billions for recovery, and aid agencies put Gaza’s reconstruction bill near $70bn. A board that can convene summits but cannot open a crossing or deploy a single soldier raises the question of what, exactly, the money is buying — and who is accountable when the plan’s phases stall.
Measured against its own plan, the board’s first year divides into one genuine achievement — the captive and prisoner exchanges, which ended the hostage crisis that had defined the war’s diplomacy — and a cascade of everything else. The structural problem is leverage: the board commands donor money (the $1bn membership tickets, the $7bn pledges) but appears to command no compliance from Israel, the one actor whose cooperation every phase of the plan requires.
Consider the sequence. Phase one required Israel to pull back to half the Strip and stop bombardments; a year later Israel holds about 60 percent, the ‘Yellow Line’ demarcating occupied ground has been pushed deeper into Gaza, Palestinians crossing it unknowingly have been shot, and Defence Minister Israel Katz said in December that the army ‘will never fully leave.’ Phase two required Hamas to disarm — but Hamas conditions disarmament on the Israeli withdrawal that never happened, and Israel conditions withdrawal on the disarmament that never happened. The plan’s phases are a circle, and the board sits at its center with no instrument to break it.
The analysts’ verdicts are unsparing. Mohamad Elmasry of the Doha Institute of Graduate Studies told Al Jazeera that Israel is pursuing a deliberate policy of making life unlivable — ‘this is all by design’ — while Simon Mabon of Lancaster University concluded the board has ‘failed,’ its inability to bind either side to their commitments having ‘allowed the genocide to continue.’ France and other European nations have objected to any attempt to replace the UN in the Strip — but, as Elmasry noted, no country is willing to confront Washington, leaving the fate of Gaza’s population effectively in Trump’s hands.
The plan envisioned the technocratic committee ruling Gaza until the Palestinian Authority — which governs parts of the occupied West Bank — could take over. With the committee exiled in Cairo and the Authority sidelined, Gaza is governed by no one the plan recognizes: Israeli forces administer the ground they hold, Hamas’s dissolved government lingers as a contested claim, and warnings and evacuation orders remain the most consistent form of authority Palestinians encounter.
The UNRWA fight is the second-order battle that reveals the first. The agency employs about 11,000 Palestinians and runs the schools, clinics and relief networks the board’s recovery plans describe in PowerPoint; sidelining it does not transfer its functions, it orphans them. A board that cannot work with the one institution actually delivering services in Gaza is not a transitional administration — it is a letterhead. Meanwhile the reconstruction gap ($7bn pledged, $70bn needed) means Palestinians face another winter in tent camps infested with rodents and insects, with little shield from heat or rain.
The board’s mandate runs to December 2027, when its progress comes up for review and possible renewal by the UN. Between now and then, the questions are binary and unresolved: does a single stabilization soldier deploy, does the Yellow Line stop moving, does the technocratic committee set foot in Gaza, does the aid flow reach 600 trucks a day. Each ‘no’ compounds the others — hunger deepens (the IPC’s December horizon already counts 1.4 million), the tent camps weather another winter, and the disarmament-withdrawal circle tightens.
The anniversary’s bleakest data point may be the trend, not the level: 200,000 more hungry than in May, more territory held than the plan allowed, more killed after the ‘ceasefire’ than during comparable stretches of the war’s diplomacy. A year ago the board promised that Gaza’s people ‘have suffered enough.’ The suffering has not stopped; only the vocabulary around it has changed.
From the Western vantage — Washington, Brussels, New York — the story is told as institution-building under fire. The administration points to the captive release and the prisoner swaps as proof the board’s diplomacy works, blames Hamas for refusing disarmament, and frames the February summit’s $7bn and the 66-project recovery plan as momentum. European capitals, led by France, draw a different Western line: they warn against sidelining the United Nations, but stop short of any step that would cross Washington.
From the region’s vantage, the story is about sovereignty traded for process. Arab and Muslim states were asked to fund the board at $1bn a seat and to staff its stabilization force — Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Albania, Kosovo and Uganda stepped forward — yet the technocratic committee they were meant to empower governs from a Cairo office because Israel will not let it into Gaza. The Doha Institute’s reading is blunt: the architecture serves continued Israeli control, and the funders have purchased seats at a table where the decisive chair answers to no one.
From the Global South’s vantage, the story is about multilateralism bypassed and then invoked. The UN General Assembly’s overwhelming June vote to extend UNRWA’s mandate to 2029 was a direct rebuke to the board’s attempt to retire the agency — yet the board, backed by Washington, proceeds as if the vote were advisory. For the governments that voted to keep UNRWA alive, the year’s lesson is familiar: resolutions pass in New York while Gaza’s devastation is administered from Washington.
A body proposed by President Donald Trump in September 2025 to stabilize Gaza and shepherd it toward lasting peace. A UN Security Council resolution in November recognized it as the Strip’s ‘transitional administration.’ Member states each pay a $1bn annual fee; its mandate runs to December 2027, when its progress comes up for review and possible renewal.
Because the core promise — a ceasefire leading to calm and reconstruction — has not materialized. More than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed since October 2025, Israel holds about 60 percent of the Strip, aid flows at a third of the promised level, no stabilization force has deployed, and there has been no meaningful reconstruction. Lancaster University’s Simon Mabon calls the record a demonstration of the board’s ‘impotence.’
Israeli forces were to withdraw to about half of Gaza and halt bombardments; Israel would free 250 Palestinian prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans jailed since October 2023, and reopen aid crossings. Hamas would release all Israeli captives, then disarm, with amnesty or safe exit for its members. A technocratic committee would govern, a US-led stabilization force would handle security, and Gaza would be rebuilt.
The board says it will not work with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which provides aid, schooling and services in Gaza and employs about 11,000 Palestinians. A board official told the Associated Press the agency’s ‘days are over,’ though its programs could continue if deemed relevant. In June, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to extend UNRWA’s mandate to 2029.
