ការគ្រប់គ្រងការដកហូតនៅហ្គាហ្សា
Until humanitarian conditions improve, Trump’s Board of Peace doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for Gaza have come into sharper focus over the past two weeks. At the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, attendees were treated to a glossy presentation of “New Gaza”—a Dubai-style coastal hub. According to Trump’s plan, his Board of Peace would govern Gaza through an executive board and a recently named Palestinian technocratic committee appointed by the Trump administration, alongside several regional representatives. Optimists argue that even if the AI-generated skyscrapers remain out of reach, Trump’s new architecture could still play a constructive role in ending the war and stabilizing Gaza.
Yet this optimism obscures the devastation and humanitarian catastrophe that still define daily life in the Gaza. The cease-fire’s humanitarian provisions were not vague. They required aid at scale and a transition to recovery. This has not happened.
Four months into the cease-fire, Palestinians in Gaza remain trapped in an Israeli permissions regime that ensures deprivation while the operating space for humanitarian agencies continues to shrink. In the past week alone, violence surged to one of its highest levels since the truce began. Palestinian health authorities report that more than 500 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli fire since the cease-fire took effect. Winter exposure has compounded the toll, with at least 10 children reportedly dying of hypothermia as shelter and aid remain severely constrained.
Phase two of the peace process envisions the demobilizing of Hamas. Yet former senior Israeli national security officials have warned that demobilization is not an overnight event. Indeed, history tells us that these processes often take years. The risk is that demobilization will become a pretext for denying lifesaving aid and early recovery for 2 million people.
Unless the situation on the ground meaningfully improves, optimistic predictions about the Board of Peace simply serve to excuse continued Palestinian suffering. As Washington pushes to disarm Hamas, it should also push Israel to fulfill its existing cease-fire obligations. Until then, Trump’s plans for Gaza should be understood as nothing more than managed deprivation.
“We are just breathing,” said a retired doctor in Gaza over WhatsApp as he showed the conditions that he and his neighbors live in. “We are not living.” He considers himself lucky to live on the fourth floor of a badly bombed out building surrounded by more destruction. “We just have to make sure the children don’t get too close to the edge,” pointing to the ragged concrete of their open-air apartment in a video message.
“Thank god I’m not in a tent,” he said, referring to the pervious makeshift cloth shelters that people have built themselves . “There is rain in the winter, but don’t even get me started about the summer. It’s like an oven, and the mice, mosquitoes, and all types of insects and sewage flowing around your feet. It’s torture.” Israel has also blocked sanitation supplies.
The doctor lives in the so-called red zone with roughly 95 percent of the Palestinian population of Gaza, where the humanitarian situation remains dire. Reduced large-scale fighting and partial increases in food entering Gaza have produced modest, fragile gains. But the cease-fire that went into effect on Oct. 10 is entrenching the conditions driving instability and Palestinian suffering. Israel continues to restrict movement, confining Gaza’s population to a shrinking area while maintaining military control over much of the territory.
Israel controls the so-called “green zone,” which now covers more than half of Gaza. Largely emptied of Palestinians, it is held under Israeli control through lethal force. Nearly 50 military outposts linked by roads and now connected to Israel are creating a physical reality on the ground that could permanently displace Palestinians. Plans for fenced-in camps such as the U.S. proposed “alternative safe communities” do not rebuild Gaza but formalize surveillance and dependence—an architecture not of peace, but of containment.
West of the yellow line, the “red zone” is where Palestinians live, dependent on limited aid. Though the immediate risk of famine has receded there, acute food insecurity and malnutrition remain at critically high levels. Survival is still precarious; any disruption—weather, renewed restrictions, violence—could rapidly reverse what little has improved.
The collapse of basic services is producing predictable—and devastating—results. Children who might have recovered with timely treatment now face lifelong disability. Hospitals are not fully functioning due to repeated Israeli attacks and the lack of supplies and personnel.
Aid obstruction has been normalized rather than resolved during the cease-fire. Israel continues to control the choke points: which crossings open, what goods are allowed, and who is permitted to import them. Essential items for daily life and recovery—medical equipment, school supplies, shelter materials—remain severely blocked. For aid, border crossings with Jordan remain effectively closed, as does Rafah, the main lifeline for Gaza along the border with Egypt. Despite repeated pronouncements that the latter crossing is opening, this is primarily for limited foot traffic.
In conversation, one U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that they are working toward a target of just 250 U.N.-coordinated aid trucks per day—far below the past benchmark of 600 trucks per day during limited cease-fires. What’s more, truck numbers are an inadequate metric; they don’t tell you what is on the trucks and how the contents compare with needs on the ground. Israel’s supporters have cited the figure of 4,200 aid trucks entering Gaza each week . However, those numbers include commercial traffic that lacks transparency.
The expansion of commercial imports does not solve Gaza’s problems. Only a small number of traders are reportedly permitted to import goods, selected through opaque criteria. They face illegal “coordination fees” that can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per truck. Those costs are passed on to civilians and aid organizations. The result is extreme inflation and the growth of a black-market economy. A cease-fire that produces a wartime economy does not lay the groundwork for peace. And no one can afford the fuel or solar panels needed to treat Gaza’s badly contaminated water.
In late December 2025, Israel informed 37 international nongovernmental organizations that their authorizations to operate in Gaza and the West Bank had expired, requiring them to cease operations by March 1, 2026, unless they complied with new registration terms. Major aid agencies such as Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, and Mercy Corps are affected, prompting warnings of a catastrophic impact on humanitarian, health, and nutrition services. These organizations support field hospitals, primary health care, emergency shelter, water and sanitation, nutrition services, and action. Removing them makes stabilization less likely, not more.
This is the environment that the Board of Peace inherits. If the group is to merit any optimism, it needs to prioritize humanitarian relief and early recovery. Aid agencies should be allowed to publish a set of objective benchmarks that the world can track weekly: predictable opening of crossings, consistent entry tied to essential services and supplies, and reliable movement permissions for aid actors and Palestinians.
The board must also resist the temptation to pivot to private sector workarounds or invent new aid mechanisms that bypass professional humanitarian coordination and service delivery. Recent history is littered with profit-centered “workarounds” that failed spectacularly because they confused politics with logistics. The Gaza pier episode and the infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation encapsulated these failures. Humanitarian response and recovery should be led by the organizations built for it and planned with Palestinians, not shadowy companies that are seeking U.S. federal contracts that would guarantee 300 percent profits and multiyear monopolies over Gaza’s economy.
In a similar vein, the board should make a clear public commitment that it will not support, finance, or legitimize plans for permanent mass relocation or deportation from Gaza. In the same spirit, it should abandon “model villages” or enclave-style recovery schemes in areas under Israeli control. Recovery resources should be routed to where people actually live—towns and neighborhoods—through housing repair, rubble removal, and meaningful service restoration.
Finally, the board must ensure that the technocratic committee can deliver immediate civilian wins. This means giving it authority to manage budgets; procure basic inputs; and coordinate municipal services such as power, water, sanitation, health, and shelter. Any transitional arrangement will fail if Palestinians do not see basic services improving quickly.
Trump’s cease-fire was sold as a bold break with the past. The first 100 days suggest that it is simply more of the same. Now the burden is on the Board of Peace to prove otherwise.
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