By Dr. Abdellatif El-Menawy

Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel will not withdraw from Gaza until Hamas is fully and verifiably disarmed—and Hamas’s reciprocal refusal to disarm while Israeli forces remain—exposes the core sequencing problem of mutual distrust at the heart of the conflict. 

Trump’s Board of Peace lacks the legal foundation, balanced structure and enforcement mechanisms of the UN Security Council; its highly personalized design concentrates exceptional power in the chairman and has turned membership into an extension of personal diplomacy. 

The board’s credibility will be determined by whether it can impose real costs on both parties, including America’s closest regional ally, when they obstruct the agreement; without constraining the strong as well as the weak, it risks functioning as an instrument of unequal power rather than a genuine arbiter of peace.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of Donald Trump’s latest Gaza plan has done something useful: it has stripped the Board of Peace of its ceremony and exposed the question at its core.

The Israeli prime minister says there will be no withdrawal from Gaza until Hamas has been fully and verifiably disarmed. Hamas, for its part, says it will not begin surrendering its weapons while Israeli attacks continue and Israeli forces remain in place. This is often described as a dispute over sequencing. In fact, it is the conflict in miniature. Each side is being asked to surrender its principal source of leverage before it trusts the other to move.

That is precisely why peace processes require more than a plan. They require an authority capable of enforcing reciprocal restraint. The future of Trump’s Board of Peace will therefore be determined less by the declarations it issues than by a harder test: can it impose costs on both parties, including America’s closest regional ally, when they obstruct the agreement?

The board was introduced with much larger ambitions. It began as part of Trump’s plan for Gaza, then expanded, in his........

© Eurasia Review