U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday that members of his Board of Peace “have pledged more than $5 billion dollars toward the Gaza humanitarian and reconstruction efforts, and have committed thousands of personnel to the International Stabilization Force and local police to maintain security and peace for Gaza.”
However, “very importantly,” Hamas terrorists must uphold their “commitment to full and immediate demilitarization,” he added.
Several top Hamas leaders, including Khaled Mashaal and Musa Abu Marzouk, have rejected key parts of the peace plan in recent weeks, including disarmament, despite having agreed to it in October 2025.
Trump in his Truth Social post confirmed that the Board of Peace would be meeting for the first time on Thursday, at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., following a Jan. 22 signing ceremony in Switzerland.
“Just last month, two dozen distinguished founding members joined me in Davos, Switzerland, to celebrate its official formation, and present a bold vision for the civilians in Gaza, and then, ultimately, far beyond Gaza—world peace!” the president wrote in the social media post.
The disarmament of Hamas and all other Palestinian terrorist groups is a precondition for the reconstruction of Gaza, the Board of Peace’s high representative for the Strip, Nickolay Mladenov, emphasized on Friday.
“Gaza needs to be governed by a transitional authority, as authorized by the Security Council resolution, under which it needs to take on the full civilian and security control of Gaza,” Mladenov said during a panel discussion at the annual Munich Security Conference.
“That includes the disarmament of all factions in Gaza, not just Hamas,” he said. “Hamas, Islamic Jihad, others—there are plenty of them who have weapons and tunnels and production facilities inside Gaza.”
The main risk is that “we’re not going to implement the second phase of the ceasefire, but instead we’re going to move to the second phase of the war,” he said, calling it “a serious threat to the situation on the ground.”
“If Gaza returns to war, there’s no place for the Board of Peace—there’s no place for any of us, until we see what is left and potentially pick up the rubble at the end of it,” Mladenov warned.
Mladenov’s comments echoed remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the start of Phase 2 of the truce.
Israel is “at the threshold of the next phase: Disarming Hamas and demilitarizing the Gaza Strip,” the premier told Knesset lawmakers on Jan. 26, emphasizing that “the next phase is not reconstruction.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly said that disarmament “will happen—as our friend Trump said—the easy way or the hard way, but it will happen.”
MK Avigdor Liberman, leader of the opposition Yisrael Beiteinu Party and a former defense minister, said on Monday that “Gaza is being rebuilt without us even having begun to dismantle and disarm Hamas.
“Right now, that dismantling isn’t happening,” he told JNS, speaking at a faction meeting at the Knesset. “No foreign force will dismantle Hamas, and we need to see what the mandate is of the Indonesian force that is arriving. ... Never has a foreign international force come to our aid.
“I do not believe that an international force can help in the case of the Gaza Strip and Hamas,” he said.
Liberman said that the Jewish state’s membership in Trump’s Board of Peace, “when the Qataris, the Turks, everyone, is there,” signals a return to “the same [security] concept that led us to October 7,” the 2023 massacre of some 1,200 people in southern Israel.
