Trump’s Board of Peace and the Man Stuck in Egypt: Gaza’s Would-Be Governor

Ali Shaath has a title — head of the transitional Palestinian committee meant to govern Gaza after Hamas. He has an overseer — former UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov. He has American backing and a 15-member team. What he does not have is permission to enter Gaza. As Trump’s Board of Peace held its first meeting Thursday, Shaath and his committee remained in Egypt, waiting.
Israel has not granted the committee permission to cross into Gaza. Israel has not commented on its decision. The silence is itself a statement — a reflection of the unresolved tensions between a ceasefire agreement that calls for a governance transition and an Israeli government that has not yet embraced the practical steps required to implement one.
Mladenov was explicit about the consequences at the Munich Security Conference. The committee cannot function without Hamas handing over power and ceasefire violations stopping. Without those conditions, the committee is being embarrassed and made ineffective before it begins. “All of this needs to move very fast,” he said — words that carried urgency but not yet results.
The committee’s limbo is a microcosm of the broader implementation failure that the Board of Peace must address. The ceasefire architecture is in place on paper. The institutions meant to implement it have been named. But the political conditions required for those institutions to actually function have not materialized — because Hamas has not disarmed, Israel has not withdrawn, and the two sides remain deeply suspicious of each other’s intentions.
Trump’s board has assembled an international coalition and made ambitious announcements. But the measure of its success will not be found in Washington conference rooms — it will be found in whether Ali Shaath and his committee can eventually cross the border and begin the work of governing a territory that desperately needs governance.