President Donald Trump's Board of Peace will hold its inaugural meeting Thursday in Washington, gathering officials from dozens of countries to hear a status report on his peace plan for the Gaza Strip and what he has described as the board's "unlimited potential" to become "the most consequential international body in history."
"We're going to have all world leaders," Trump told reporters Monday.
But it remains unclear which leaders, or how many, will show up for the meeting to be held at the recently renamed Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace.
Of the 60 or so invitations he sent to heads of state to serve on the board, about two dozen countries have agreed to join. They include some who are far removed from events in the Middle East but in Trump's good graces, such as Argentina's Javier Milei and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban.
Belarus's dictator, Alexandr Lukashenko, accepted the invitation but is sending his foreign minister. More than half the countries that have joined, including Belarus, are on the administration's recently released list of 75 nations barred from U.S. visas pending a State Department review.
Pakistan's prime minister is coming, but many in the Middle East are sending lower-ranking officials; some, particularly in Europe, have said they will attend only as "observers." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to attend and will be represented by Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
Under the board charter, which Trump signed last month onstage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, temporary membership is free for three years, while the price of a permanent seat is a $1 billion "in cash funds ... within the first year." It is not clear which attendees have paid.
In a social media post Sunday, Trump said he will announce more than $5 billion pledged by member nations of the board toward Gaza humanitarian aid and reconstruction, and commitments of "thousands of personnel" toward the International Stabilization Force (ISF) and local police outlined in his plan. He also demanded that Hamas uphold "its commitment to full and immediate demilitarization."
Progress in any of those areas would be a significant step forward for what has been the lagging implementation of the second phase of the plan announced in September and endorsed three months ago by the U.N. Security Council. The first phase included a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that has partially held, an increase in humanitarian assistance despite ongoing Israeli restrictions and the release of all hostages held by Hamas and thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Hopes are high among many in the Middle East that definitive actions will be announced. But plans for imminent next steps have come and gone since the beginning of the year, with a U.S. official saying last month that the formation of the ISF was then expected to be announced "within days."
According to the U.N. Security Council resolution that blessed Trump's 20-point plan, troop contributions from board member states will make up the ISF. Its mission, mandated by the U.N. until the end of 2027, is to help secure border areas and ensure Gaza is demilitarized, "including the destruction and prevention of rebuilding of the military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, as well as the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups," and to "protect civilians ... train and provide support to the vetted Palestinian police forces ... [and] secure humanitarian corridors."
So far, only Indonesia has publicly agreed to send forces to the ISF, saying it will initially contribute about 2,000, arriving no sooner than April. Indonesian officials have said they will not deploy beyond the half of Gaza still occupied by the Israeli military. The Israel Defense Forces have tested the truce with repeated airstrikes against what it says are ongoing threats from the other half of the enclave, controlled by Hamas.
Under the Trump plan, a technocratic team of Palestinians, known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) will organize local governance. The NCAG has been appointed but is unable to enter Gaza due to Israeli resistance and questions about safety. U.S. private contractors have been approached by the Trump administration to provide security for the committee at least until the new Palestinian police force is in place, although no contracts have yet been signed according to people familiar with the outreach who spoke on condition of anonymity about private negotiations.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and one of his top negotiators, presented plans at the Davos forum to build a residential community for Palestinians in a rubble-cleared area of southern Gaza still occupied by Israel. It is to be the first of six planned "cities" in the enclave, along with high-tech manufacturing sites and "180 towers" built as a tourism resort along Gaza's Mediterranean coast.
But neither funding nor a start date for the project has been announced. A senior official of the United Arab Emirates, which some U.S. officials have said would help pay for the initial Rafah community, declined to comment.
"The American team is working with an impossible situation," complicated by "a very stubborn right-wing government" in Israel and a Hamas movement that, despite Trump's declaration of its commitment, has waffled on when, how much and under what conditions it will disarm," said a senior official in the region, one of several U.S. and foreign officials who discussed the sensitive situation on condition of anonymity.
If Thursday's meeting can "go forward with funding, the ISF, policing," the official added, "the hope is that the decommissioning part will come easier. ... If you don't want to do anything, then nothing moves."
The question of disarmament and "decommissioning" Hamas as a military force has been a roadblock to progress in virtually every other aspect of the plan's second phase, providing an argument for Israel and others to postpone implementation of further steps.
Hamas officials, who have met with Kushner and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, sat down last week with Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian politician and diplomat named Board of Peace "high representative" for Gaza. Hamas has said publicly it won't give up its weapons until Israeli forces completely withdraw.
"We have not received any draft or official proposals from mediators regarding the weapons of the resistance," senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said last week in an interview with Al Jazeera. "The movement has not officially adopted any decision" on the question, he said, adding that "resistance is a right as long as the occupation exists."
Israel, meanwhile, says it will not withdraw until Hamas militants are totally disarmed and decommissioned.
"No final agreement has been reached on the plan [to disarm], its mechanisms or the timeline for its implementation, which is what we expect to be determined during the [Thursday] meeting," a former senior Egyptian official close to the negotiations said Tuesday. "This issue will be the central focus of the second phase and indeed its foundation."
"Those are ongoing conversations," the U.S. official said, describing the disarmament talks as "a challenge." Hamas has agreed to disarm in private conversations with U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators, the official said, but the question is "what that looks like in practice."
According to the Kushner prospectus delivered in a slideshow at Davos, it means the immediate destruction of "heavy weapons, tunnels, military infrastructure, weapons production facilities and munitions." Rifles and pistols are eventually to be registered by the NCAG, which will decide who is allowed to have them.
"We are under no illusions on the challenges regarding demilitarization, but we have been encouraged by what the mediators have reported back," a second U.S. official who briefed reporters Wednesday said speaking on condition of anonymity under rules set by the administration.
Countries in the region have expressed skepticism about this and other elements of the plan but have signed on to it with many believing that only Trump can pressure Israel to comply and reach the ultimate goal of Palestinian statehood it envisions. Some expressed dismay this week at Trump's lack of comment about separate Israeli moves toward annexation of the occupied West Bank despite his repeated insistence he would not allow that to happen.
So far, Israel seems determined not to budge on key parts of the Gaza plan. In a virtual address Sunday to presidents of major American Jewish organizations, Netanyahu dismissed the call for "heavy weapons" disarmament. "'Disarmed' means that it must give up weapons, not main weapons," he said including even standard-issue arms like the AK-47.
"We're giving the president's plan a chance," Netanyahu said recalling a pledge by Trump that it would be done one way or another. "We hope that it will be the easy way ... but that goal has to be achieved."
At a conference Monday in Jerusalem Israeli Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs a top Netanyahu adviser said that after discussions with the Trump administration Israel had agreed to give Hamas 60 days to disarm completely. "We will evaluate it," he said. "If it works great. If not then the IDF will have to complete the mission."
Mladenov the board's high representative for Gaza said at the Munich Security Conference last week that the next phase of Trump's plan needs to "move very fast" to avert a resumption of war. "We need to understand that if we don't move quickly with implementation ... we risk a division within Gaza itself split into two zones ... and then it will be very difficult to do anything else."
While a person familiar with planning for Thursday Board of Peace gathering said its inaugural meeting will be "singularly focused on Gaza," Gaza is not mentioned in the organization's charter. The board's mission Trump said Monday goes "far beyond Gaza. I think it'll be peace all over the world."
In turning down his invitation many governments questioned whether Trump intends the board to supplant the United Nations as a global peacemaking body. Trump has sharply criticized the U.N., and his refusal to have the U.S. pay its dues during his second term has been a major factor in sending the organization into fiscal crisis.
"As a leading founder and longstanding supporter of the United Nations it is important that the Board's work is complementary to and consistent with the U.N. charter," New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said in a social media post rejecting board membership. Many European allies have expressed the same concern; only Hungary and Bulgaria have joined.
Some leaders apparently have decided to take part as a way of building relations with Trump. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto who arrived Tuesday evening in Washington “has been wanting to have a bilateral meeting with President Trump for quite a while now,” although so far “the White House has not been receptive of the idea,” said a senior official in the country’s foreign affairs ministry who spoke on condition of anonymity about internal discussions.
Under the terms of the Board of Peace charter Trump who named himself chairman and has veto power over most of its decisions is expected to continue leading the body after his presidential term although next American president will be guaranteed membership according to person familiar with board plans.
"Continuity is important," the person said. "Leadership of people who have the right relationships and push the right levers is important."