Marketed as diplomacy, Gaza’s so-called “Board of Peace” masks ongoing Israeli killings, aid blockades, and mass dispossession, transforming genocide into a managed, internationally sanctioned process.
The so-called ceasefire in Gaza was a cynical ruse to secure Israeli captives while giving Israel free rein to starve, murder, and assassinate at will. The world was duped into swallowing yet another Zionist deception, orchestrated by Israel-first Americans, financed with US taxpayer dollars, and drenched in Palestinian blood.
Since the ceasefire was announced, more than 1700 have been murdered or injured by Israeli fire. In one day this past week, Israel murdered 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including three journalists and children.
By the numbers, this ceasefire has been a misnomer, amounting to an average of 17 Palestinians killed or injured every day over the past 100 days. Of those, and according to UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, “More than 100 children have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire . . . one girl or boy killed every day.”
Some were shot or bombed. Babies died more quietly, but no less violently, freezing to death. Infants die of hypothermia not because winter is unforgiving, but because Israel has destroyed their homes and continues to block UNRWA from bringing safe shelters, winterized tents, and adequate housing into Gaza. Infants perish from cold in Gaza, not as a result of a natural disaster; they are victims of an evil Israeli policy.
Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump remain sanguine, insisting the ceasefire has “held” since early October 2025. One can ask, would they make the same assertions if only ten Israeli Jewish children had been killed? The answer is self-evident. This is not bias or ignorance. It is racism: a blood-soaked moral order, Western and Jewish supremacist calculus that renders Palestinian babies disposable, while the life of Jewish children is sacrosanct.
At the center of this deception is the so-called yellow line, an ill-defined military boundary marking Israeli partial withdrawal as part of phase one of the supposed ceasefire. The yellow line has become a trap, a moving frontier. Israel shifts it in the middle of the night, and mows Palestinians down in daylight, without oversight, and without warning. Palestinians believed the ceasefire meant a chance to return to inspect their damaged homes, recover belongings, or forage for wild plants to feed their children. Instead, they find their homes erased, not in battle, but methodically by an enemy insatiable with hate.
Parallel to this, aid is not allowed to enter Gaza in accordance with the “ceasefire” agreement. The siege has not been lifted. It was refined. Convoys are delayed. Medical equipment is rejected over technicalities. Fuel, shelter materials, and prefabricated housing are blocked or restricted. Hospitals go without medicine not because of unavailability, but because Israel has revoked the licenses of 37 aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, preventing them from sending staff or bringing aid in. Babies freezing to death while UNRWA is barred from delivering safe shelters is not a humanitarian failure; it is intentional murder.
As Israel’s atrocities in Gaza continue, as Israeli Jewish mobs terrorize Palestinian villages, torch homes, and assault civilians with near-total impunity, and as new Jewish-only colonies expand across the occupied West Bank, Israel is escalating regional tensions with calculated intent. A familiar display of chicanery provokes a wider confrontation to shift headlines, play victim, and drown culpability in the noise of a larger war. To that end, Israel is openly goading a confrontation with Iran in a bid to draw the United States into another made-for-Israel war. A war to serve Israeli political interests only, while exacting catastrophic costs on the region, as well as on American lives and resources.
The United States remains Israel’s main enabler for laundering war crimes through diplomatic language. Europe’s wishy-washy position is no less cynical. In late 2025, the European Union debated punitive measures, including suspension of the preferential trade Agreement over Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law. Those measures were shelved the moment the fictional ceasefire was announced. By halting accountability in exchange for a supposed ceasefire, the EU granted Israel another pass. Israel understood the message, adjusted its tactics, and the violations intensified. Demolitions continued, aid was strangled, and children died not only by bullets or bombs, but also by freezing to death.
Now we hear echoes of Trump’s archetypal diplomatic hubbub, cynically sold to the world as a “Board of Peace.” A “Board” that includes among its membership an indicted war criminal, who skips Davos’ signing to evade arrest and the ICC, is not peace; it’s a farce at the highest level. A “Board” supposedly created for Gaza, yet it excludes Palestinian representation and has morphed into a billion-dollar club with lifetime memberships, governed by a charter that cannot even bring itself to name Gaza, Palestine, or any credible path to self-determination.
At the launch of his “Board,” Trump ignored the Israeli killing of more than 470 Palestinians and the infants left to freeze to death in Gaza. Instead, he dwelled on his fixation with recovering the body of an Israeli soldier and on disarming the occupied. If this inauguration speech is any indication, the “Board of Peace” will be nothing but a performative shell, not a pathway to human justice.
What emerges, in reality, is something closer to a Jared Kushner real-estate venture run by a self-appointed dictator with no mandate and answerable to no one. And where Chapter VI Article 6 grants the Board “… to enter into contracts, acquire and dispose of immovable and movable property, … receive and disburse private and public funds…”
Palestinians do not need another peace circus, nor shark billionaires who view Gaza through the prism of a real-estate opportunity rather than the people. There can be no “peace” that erases Palestinian agency while entrenching Israeli criminal impunity. What Palestinians demand is self-determination and the right to live in a secure, sovereign state of their own. Anything less is not peace; it’s an international management of subjugation and oppression.
Gaza does not need another phase or “Board.” Gaza needs legal redress for an Israeli system of cruelty. It must be granted unimpeded ingress and egress by land, sea, and air. Gaza must not be condemned to survive as a managed humanitarian dependency, rationed by aid and policed by donors. The international community must reclaim the primacy of international law by allowing the International Criminal Court to prosecute indicted Israeli political and military leaders for war crimes and genocide— without American coercion, without Western exceptionalism, and without the moral fraud of double standards.
A ceasefire that leaves infants freezing to death because Israel continues to block the entry of weather shelters is not peace. A “Board” that grants itself the authority to “acquire and dispose of … property,” while Israel violates agreements in Gaza and Jewish mobs terrorize communities in the West Bank, is a new phase in the normalization of mass dispossession and genocide.
Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
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