Gaza as a catalyst for President Trump’s counter-UNO

From Sacha Wigdorovits

You may or may not like US President Donald Trump, but you have to give him credit for one thing: He has pulled a rather frivolous fast one on the UN. On November 17 last year, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2803. In it, it announced its support for the 20-point peace plan for Gaza published by Trump in September 2025. And thus also gave the green light for the establishment of a so-called “Board of Peace” contained in the plan. Led by Donald Trump himself, of course.

So far so good. But now that the American president has announced numerous details about the “Board of Peace” in recent days, it is becoming clear that this is not just about Gaza: This board is by no means just about Gaza and a peaceful future for the Mediterranean coastal strip, which has been ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas and partially occupied by the Israeli army.

It is true that Gaza is discussed in detail in the communication published by the White House last week on the “Board of Peace”. It was announced that the civil administration of Gaza would be transferred to a “National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG)” consisting of 12 Palestinian technocrats.

This is to be headed by Ali Sha’aht. The trained civil engineer comes from Gaza, but is very familiar with administrative tasks from the West Bank, where he worked in various management positions for the Palestinian Authority (PA). Sha’aht has also already announced that he plans to dump the mountains of rubble left behind by the two-year war in Gaza caused by Hamas’ massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023 into the sea. The aim is to open up new land for Gaza’s population of 2 million.

For its challenging task of rebuilding the heavily devastated coastal strip and normalizing life there, the NCAG will be assisted by an advisory body called the Gaza Executive Board. It will be chaired by Trump confidant Steve Witkoff and consist of politicians, military officers and businessmen of various nationalities, including former British Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair.

In addition, the White House has announced that the American Major General Jasper Jeffers is to head the so-called “International Stabilization Force ISF”. This is a multinational military unit that is to be responsible for the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip.

The Board of Peace itself will be represented in its activities in Gaza by the former Bulgarian top diplomat Nikolay Mladenov. As “The High Representative”, he will be the delegate of the “Peace Council” presided over by President Trump and its liaison to the NCAG. Mladenov enjoys a good reputation on both the Palestinian-Arab and Israeli sides.

The Board of Peace does not want to take on this task itself. Nor does it want its management, the so-called “Executive Board” (not to be confused with the “Gaza Executive Board” despite personnel overlaps), to do so. For good reason: the “Board of Peace” has taken up the cause of other peace missions with its “Executive Board”.

This is clear from the organization’s founding charter alone: not a single word is mentioned there about Gaza! Instead, Article 1 states: “The Board of Peace is an international organization that seeks to promote stability, restore reliable and legitimate governance and secure lasting peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”

In other words, with the blessing of the UN on November 17, 2025, US President Donald Trump has laid the foundation for a counter-UN. The first four sentences of the preamble to the Charter make it clear why he considers this necessary. In it, the UN is massively criticized. It is criticized that (at the UN) “too many approaches to peacebuilding promote permanent dependency and institutionalize crises instead of leading people beyond them.” Therefore, according to the introduction to the founding charter of the Board of Peace, an organization that is “more flexible”, “more agile” and “more effective” is needed to mediate peace.

This criticism of the United Nations is justified. The bottom line is that the UN is largely dysfunctional. Its bodies and representatives are increasingly lacking credibility. One reason for this is their partiality. Israel in particular is repeatedly judged by particularly strict standards in the UN and pilloried. Often with the support of Switzerland. Secondly, the UN has proved incapable of mediating solutions, let alone enforcing them, in all major conflicts in recent decades. Where this has been the case, it has always been through no fault of its own.

This not only applies to the conflict in the Middle East, which has been going on for over 80 years, as the war in Gaza showed. It was also the case in the Kosovo war (1998-99) and the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda (1994). And it is now the case again with the war in Ukraine, the civil war in Sudan and the bloody suppression of the protest movement in Iran by the inhuman mullah regime.

So far, Argentina’s President Xavier Milei, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, have confirmed their participation in US President Trump’s new peace organization. However, the latter had to jump over his shadow, as Hamas supporters Turkey and Qatar are also represented on certain committees of the new organization.

A total of 59 countries have agreed to join the new peace organization, US President Trump announced at the World Economic Forum WEF in Davos, where he signed the charter of the “Board of Peace” together with 19 representatives of other governments. This includes all Arab countries as well as numerous Eastern European, Asian and South American countries. The EU countries Germany, France and Great Britain are still holding back from participating out of consideration for the UN. President Guy Parmelin did not want to announce in Davos whether Switzerland, which has also been invited, will take part

In Gaza – and in Ukraine – the “Board of Peace” must now show whether it is capable of more than the “failure organization” UN, which it would like to replace. If it lives up to its name and actually establishes a lasting and just peace in these two places, then US President Donald Trump really does deserve the coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

And all those Western European states that are (still) refusing to join the Board of Peace out of a misguided sense of solidarity with the UN will then have to be told: “Les absents ont toujours tort – the absent are always wrong.”

See also: The organization of the new peace organization

About the Charter of the Board of Peace: Charter of the Board of Peace

Sacha Wigdorovits is President of the Fokus Israel und Nahost association, which runs the website fokusisrael.ch. He studied history, German and social psychology at the University of Zurich and has worked as a US correspondent for the SonntagsZeitung, was editor-in-chief of BLICK and co-founder of the commuter newspaper 20minuten.