There is no ceasefire in Gaza; no functioning “Board of Peace.” There is only genocide. It changes shape and intensity but not its essence.
The Peace President – by Mr. Fish.
There is no ceasefire in Gaza. There is no functioning “Board of Peace.” There is no roadmap to ending the genocide or mechanism to creation of a Palestinian state. Israel has refused to implement or abide by any of the conditions of Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” since its inception. It won’t begin to honor them now.
There is only genocide. It changes shape and intensity. But it does not change its essence.
Trump’s plan is a mirage, a conjuring trick, a fleeting vanity project. In October 2025, Trump gathered world leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to announce his peace deal, which he said “took 3,000 years” to achieve, before disappearing offstage.
The peace plan, like the smoke-and-mirrors act that defines the Trump era, has been relegated to a dark memory hole, as our P.T. Barnum commander in chief trots out another bloody spectacle: war on Iran.
Trump announced an “historic” agreement on July 30 that entailed “the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza.” He called the 15-point plan, credited to the Board of Peace, which has no Palestinian representatives and installed Trump as its chair for life, “a monumental step toward lasting peace and security.”
But Hamas swiftly qualified the demand by saying that handing over its heavy weapons was only contingent on Israel ending “all forms of” its “aggression” and withdrawing its occupying forces from Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu blithely dismissed Trump’s proposal. Israel, he said, will not withdraw its forces until Hamas is “genuinely” disarmed.
Read this to mean never.
The peace plan — which was endorsed by the United Nations in a stunning disregard for Palestinian sovereignty and international law — was never more than a publicity stunt. It exists to provide Israel with the diplomatic cover to bring the genocide to its intended conclusion — the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza — a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and President Donald Trump, seated, with several foreign leaders looking on, at a Board of Peace meeting on Feb. 20, 2026. (The White House /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Since the “ceasefire” went into effect on Oct. 10, 2025, two months before the Trump “peace plan” was formalised, Israel has killed 1,258 Palestinians in Gaza.
Ceasefires with these body counts are not ceasefires.
Once Gaza is emptied, the West Bank will be next.
Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, this one is the least serious.
Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire began — which took place — it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement.
That is the point.
When the plan was announced, I wrote:
“It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand…. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only ‘rhetoric’”
Israel, I noted, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”
I asked:
“Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?”
“How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?”
“How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?”
“Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an ‘International Stabilization Force,’ a polite term for foreign occupation?”
“Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?”
Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to U.N. estimates.
An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, Jan. 21, 2025. (UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
The Strip has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including nine million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste, and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordinance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. Israel has demolished some 1,500 buildings since the ceasefire went into effect.
How can anyone believe that Israel, intent on leveling Gaza, will reverse itself to allow Palestinians to rebuild what it spent so much time, money and blood to destroy?
Retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, echoed this sentiment on Sunday on Israel’s 103FM radio station. Eiland said:
“Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt, it is better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come….”
“The greater the despair in Gaza and the greater the destruction, and the greater the monument to what they did on October 7, years to come, that is good.”
Israel will never permit reconstruction in Gaza. It will never restore health facilities or water treatment plants. It will never turn over authority to an International Stabilization Force (I.S.F.), one which only exists on paper. It will never permit the creation of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza or agree to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.
Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras.
An AI-generated image of an imaginary Trump Hotel in Gaza, shared on social media by Donald Trump, February 2025. (Screenshot, Wikimedia Commons)
But Trump’s Gaza Riviera is nothing more than a pathetic temporary camp along the ceasefire line near Rafah. It consists of “portable cabins” under Palestinian administration and a tiny international security force, according to The Guardian.
It is touted, in desperation, as a pilot scheme.
‘Not a Single Dollar’
Despite some $17 billion in pledges to the Board of Peace, as of late May 2026 not a single dollar had reached its official World Bank-administered Gaza reconstruction fund. Only about $23 million had been received through alternative channels for operating costs, with a further $100 million pledged by the United Arab Emirates that was earmarked for a future Palestinian police force, though it remains “frozen,” according to the Financial Times.
This amounts to about $0.72 for every $100 pledged.
Given the heavy economic costs incurred by Gulf and regional donor countries because of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran — including Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the UAE — it is very unlikely the pledged funds will be paid.
The European Union, the U.N. and the World Bank, in an assessment published in April, estimated that $71.4 billion is needed for recovery in Gaza.
Nickolay Mladenov, designated head of the Board of Peace, in 2020. (EPP, CCA-2.0)
The Board of Peace, for which Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov is the principal official, is desperate for funds.
The U.S. attempted to pilfer $11 billion in Palestinian tax revenues and frozen bank funds withheld by Israel, which was rejected by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Israeli withholding of tax revenues has deepened the financial crisis in the West Bank, with the PA slashing salaries in half of thousands of Palestinian civil servants.
The I.S.F., a multinational peacekeeping force that is supposed to be composed of troops from Albania, Kosovo, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Uganda and Indonesia — the latter of which has since suspended its commitment, is also nonexistent.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strook have demanded that Netanyahu reconvene the Security Cabinet so that its July 26 vote authorizing the entry of I.S.F. troops can be reversed.
The entire Trump project is an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy.
Anyone in Gaza who strays close to the Yellow Line — which is constantly shifting and poorly marked — is shot. Police are shot. Hamas leaders, along with their families — including Azzam Khalil al-Hayya, the son of Khalil al-Hayya who was the head of Hamas’ political bureau and the faction’s lead negotiator — are assassinated.
Palestinians lining up at food kitchens and those handing out aid to them are obliterated by Israeli bombs. Israel restricts food and humanitarian aid to half of the trucks stipulated in the ceasefire agreement.
Palestinians, 90 percent of whom have been displaced, continue to live in tent cities amid rubble and open pools of raw sewage. They lack toilets or electricity. There is an 80 percent unemployment rate. Tens of thousands of children suffer acute malnutrition in Gaza. A child, on average, is killed every day.
Tacitus understood. They made a desert and call it peace.
Trump’s plan was not designed to end the conflict. It was not designed to provide an equitable settlement for the Palestinians. It was not designed to halt the ongoing mass slaughter. It was designed to allow Israel to complete its genocide and drive surviving Palestinians from their homeland — the culmination of the Zionist dream.
Trump, however obtuse, has at least figured this out.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Please Donate to
CN’s Summer
Fund Drive!
Unfortunate, as it is for the extremely suffering people from Palestine-
what would you expect from mass murderers establishing a “Board of Peace”?
It was and is very predictable.
As long as those severe criminals are not held accountable, nothing can change for the better.
Nothing has helped cure the problems inherit in monotheistic warfare always accompanied by the strategic use of defamation of character as weapons of choice over centuries and regions of the one true planet Earth that gave us life and behavioral problems adjusting to it.
“There is only genocide. It changes shape and intensity. But it does not change its essence.
Therefore, the correct name is Trump’s Board of Genocide. Anyone who had enough sense to call it this from the beginning, is not surprised today. Anyone who has called this criminal organization as a Board of Peace should have gone off to read Orwell instead.
Did you think that Trump and Netanyahu had agreed on a plan for Peace? Or was it more likely, even back then, that they were agreeing on a plan of murder for profitable real estate development? Did you really trust Trump and believe his word? If so, I’ve got some swamp land in Florida where you can get in below the ground floor and thus make huge profits.
We can always count on Chris Hedges to report thoroughly and clearly.
Personal question to Chris:
You recently wrote you had an article coming out questioning if Jesus was merely a man. I’ve been waiting, and looking forward to that. Did you change your mind? Rob
This is an example of just how corrosive and diminishing Israel’s influence is on the USA.
If Russia, China, Iran did what Israel has done to Palestinians, there never would be an end to hearing the word “genocide.”
I just saw that the progressive Senate candidate from Minnesota says on her website that we need to fight a war with Russia because of Russia’s illegal war that has invaded Ukraine and occupied some of its sacred territory. Meanwhile, Gaza is outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders, as is the entire West Bank. Israel has been in an illegal occupation of lands it seized by military invasion in a war that was an infamous sneak attack on its neighbors, yet nobody mentions that. Yet, it is rarely mentioned these days that Israel has no right to even be in Gaza or the West Bank.
If we applied what we say about Russia and Ukraine to Israel, then Israel should have been forced to withdraw from the lands it seized in war.
Excellent article, but very depressing. “How long O Lord?”
Abandon israel. What have they ever done for us, except get lots of aid and weaponry?
They’ve gotten the USA into this era of Endless Wars from Iraq to Iran, with a lot of side trips in between. When gas hits $10 a gallon because of this current war, you can put a blue and white Star of David sticker on the gas pumps and a saying that reads “We did that!” Don’t sell them short by saying all they’ve done is to have gotten billions and billions of taxpayer dollars of aid and weaponry. In many ways, Israel has destroyed America.
As usual, the FBI was looking in the wrong direction for the enemies that would end The American Century.
Israel is evil incarnate, but it only exists and is able to do what it does because of the USA. This evil, madness could stop tomorrow if the USA wanted, but it doesn’t.
Netenyahu and Trump are just symptoms of the madness, removing them won’t stop the madness.
Correct. This is still Biden’s Genocide. Perhaps it has become the Biden/Trump Genocide. If the Democrats had gotten close enough to steal the last election, then it would be the Biden/Harris Genocide. If Gov. Newsome gets elected, it will become the Biden/Trump/Newsome Genocide. If Trump eats one too many Big Macs, or if the Republicans steal the next election, it might become the Biden/Trump/Vance Genocide. Likewise, the partner in genocide might well shift from Netanyahu to General Eisenkot, but that won’t give the burial parties in Palestine any breaks.
It is a mistake to focus on the personalities. The oligarchs that run America are obviously connected closely to Israel. That connection remains strong no matter what the voters might feel, say or vote.
It goes on. The moneyed filth that is ThinkTankistan has a variety of masks and false narratives. We know what the so-called settlers’ function is. No additional understanding is necessary. Legacy media’s job is to lie to you; To prevaricate; And to maintain things as Boss wants them. Your television is lying to you!