Maureen Clare Murphy
The Electronic Intifada / June 1, 2026
More than half a year after the US president announced a ceasefire deal to end Israel’s military offensive, little has changed for Palestinians in Gaza who have endured more than two years of relentless attacks and deprivation of the necessities of life.
Authorities in Gaza, human rights groups and aid organizations are warning that despite the nominal ceasefire, Israel is still using food as a weapon of war while Palestinian families, denied adequate shelter, are being made to live in deplorable and unsafe conditions.
Around 940 people in Gaza have been killed since the supposed ceasefire went into effect in October 2025, bringing the death toll since October 2023 to more than 72,940, as of 1 June.
Around a third of those killed since the ceasefire were targeted near the so-called Yellow Line demarcating the nearly two-thirds of Gaza’s territory where Israeli ground troops remain deployed, according to the UN human rights office.
“The available information raises serious concerns that the Israeli army is shooting at and killing presumed civilians simply on the basis of their proximity to the so-called yellow line, which would amount to unlawful killings and thus war crimes,” Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN human rights office in the occupied Palestinian territory, told Reuters.
The dead in Gaza also include dozens of civilian police personnel, many killed while on duty, while Israel-backed armed gangs attempt to undermine attempts by the authorities in Gaza to maintain civil order. Israel has also assassinated the leaders of Hamas’ military wing in their homes along with their family members, as well as the son of Hamas’ chief negotiator.
In April alone, at least 111 people, including 18 children and seven women, were killed in Israeli airstrikes, shelling and by drone attacks and gunfire in Gaza.
Warnings of ‘total collapse’
All captives held in Gaza since October 2023 have been released by armed groups as part of the deal. But instead of withdrawing, Israel’s ground forces are now in direct control of more of Gaza’s territory than the 53 percent mapped in the ceasefire deal, pushing Palestinians ever closer to the sea.
In recent days, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said that he directed the military to seize 70 percent of Gaza’s territory.
And instead of allowing for the surge in unfettered aid called for by the ceasefire, Israel is delaying, blocking and otherwise hindering the delivery of life-saving assistance.
On 14 May, World Central Kitchen announced that while there was no reduction in the need for food assistance in Gaza, it was reducing the number of meals it is cooking to pre-ceasefire levels due to financial and capacity restraints.
“We specialize in emergency food relief, not long-term food security,” the US charity said. “Governments, institutions and international partners need to commit the sustained, secure funding that this crisis demands.”
After three people were killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting a community kitchen in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on 17 May, the Palestinian human rights group Al-Mezan said that Israel was pushing “humanitarian conditions toward total collapse … as part of a systematic policy of using starvation as a weapon.”
On 25 May, on the eve of the Eid al-Adha holiday, the Government Media Office in Gaza warned of a “dangerous and unprecedented” worsening of the already catastrophic humanitarian situation amid the ongoing Israeli blockade.
Basic foods were in short supply amid “soaring rates of poverty and displacement” in Gaza, where the unemployment rate has risen to nearly 80 percent.
Less than a third of the number of trucks stipulated in the ceasefire agreement have entered Gaza, the Government Media Office added, “a dangerously low figure that is utterly insufficient to address the escalating humanitarian, food, health and relief needs.”
During a recent press conference at the UN Correspondents Association press room in New York, Janti Soeripto, the head of Save the Children US, said that children are still arriving at the charity’s clinics showing signs of acute malnutrition.
Soeripto was joined by the principals of Oxfam America and Refugees International, as well as a medical doctor who worked at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital during April, to ring the alarm bell that the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are not being met.
Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, said that Israel “is continuing … to systematically obstruct humanitarian aid,” including by deregistering aid workers and organizations, while the US was failing to hold Israel to its commitments.
The result is that “people cannot get enough food, children and families are camped out in raw sewage waiting for any kind of proper shelter.”
Konyndyk added that the obstruction of aid doesn’t only violate UN Security Council Resolution 2803, which endorses the Gaza ceasefire and conferred legitimacy onto the US president’s Board of Peace. Nor does it only contradict Israel’s commitments under the ceasefire deal.
“It is an outright violation of obligations under international humanitarian law, completely irrespective of any UN Security Council resolution or peace commitments.”
“There is no legal basis” for conditioning the facilitation of humanitarian aid on political concessions, Konyndyk added.
Bait and switch
Humanitarian aid groups attempting to deliver life essentials in Gaza say that Israel is the party violating the agreement in the ceasefire deal and hindering a surge in aid – what should be the most straightforward and uncomplicated aspect of the agreement to execute.
And yet the Board of Peace’s report to the UN Security Council on the implementation of the ceasefire deal obscures Israel’s responsibility for the current situation in Gaza, placing the blame for the ongoing impasse on Hamas and other armed groups for their refusal to give up arms.
Israel is not faulted by name in the report, despite the hundreds of people killed and thousands injured in Gaza since October, the continued obstruction of aid and other blatant violations of both the ceasefire deal and international law.
For its part, Hamas accuses the US and Israel of moving the goalposts and trying to “implement terms that Hamas never agreed to – specifically, disarming the resistance while Israeli forces continue to occupy most of Gaza and violate the ceasefire on a daily basis,” as Drop Site News reported.
Based on interviews with the leaders of Palestinian resistance factions, Drop Site added that Palestinian negotiators argue that Washington and Tel Aviv have scrapped the narrow terms of the October agreement – which is categorically different from the 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” dated 29 September 2025, published by the White House, and replaced it with the 15-point framework that was presented to Hamas in this April and summarized by the Bulgarian politician and diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative of the Board of Peace, on X.
That agreement, as Drop Site News summarizes, “demands the total disarmament of the Palestinian resistance as a prerequisite to implementing the terms of the signed deal” – in other words, the “total victory” and surrender of Hamas that Israel was unable to achieve on the battlefield.
Mohammed Al-Hindi, the chief negotiator for Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was involved in the October deal, told Drop Site that the position of the resistance is that weapons are a “national issue to be discussed in the second phase [of the ceasefire deal], and that before entering the second phase, the first phase must be implemented.”
Hamas and other factions maintain that they did not agree to anything beyond the six-step ceasefire agreement that dealt with the release of all captives in Gaza, living and dead, in exchange for Palestinians held by Israel; the cessation of all military operations; partial withdrawal of the Israeli military; and the “full entry of humanitarian aid and relief.”
“Officially, there is no deal on the terms of a ‘second phase,’” Drop Site News added.
Despite this, Hamas says that it has created a mechanism for handing over power over Gaza’s civil affairs to the National Committee for Administration of Gaza created by the Board of Peace. However, Israel has not allowed the committee to enter Gaza and, according to Hamas leader Osama Hamdan, Mladenov “has failed to convince the Israelis or compel them.”
Instead, Mladenov appears to be singularly focused on pressuring Hamas.
The Times of Israel reported in May that Mladenov warned Hamas in a letter that failure to accept the Board of Peace’s disarmament framework would render the commitments of the ceasefire deal “null and void.”
The warning can be reasonably interpreted as a threat to resume Israel’s high-intensity attacks on Gaza that have killed tens of thousands of people – presumable acts of genocide, according to a preliminary ruling of the International Court of Justice – and a further tightening of the siege and return to famine conditions met with an arrest warrant for Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court.
Mladenov’s letter was co-authored by Aryeh Lightstone, a senior adviser to Trump envoy Steve Witkoff. During Trump’s first administration, Lightstone was senior adviser to David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, and was appointed special envoy for economic normalization for the advancement of the Abraham Accords – the full normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel that was hailed by Trump as a “historic diplomatic breakthrough” when the agreement was inked in 2020.
Mladenov, who also heads a UAE government diplomatic training institute, championed the normalization deals ushered in during Trump’s first administration while he was the UN secretary-general’s Middle East envoy.
Mladenov’s style of diplomacy then, as now, is to “badger Palestinians into accepting an unjust status quo while making little to no demands on Israel,” as this writer put it in 2020.
While delivering ultimatums and threats to Hamas, Mladenov is handling Israel and its prime minister, wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes, with kid gloves.
The Bulgarian diplomat stated on 5 May that he had a “positive and substantive discussion” with Netanyahu during which “we all reaffirmed our commitment to the full implementation of President Trump’s 20-Point Comprehensive Plan.”
The following day, Israel targeted Azzam al-Hayya – the son of Khalil al-Hayya, the head of Hamas’ political bureau and the faction’s lead negotiator – killing him and another person and injuring nine others in the Gaza City attack.
Mladenov has made no condemnations of Israel’s assassinations or slaughter of civilians in Gaza during the nominal ceasefire while obscuring Israel’s obstruction of aid – a blatant violation of the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 provisional measures to prevent genocide, its subsequent additional measures and October 2025 advisory opinion finding that Israel’s restrictions on aid into Gaza breached international law.
Meanwhile the Board of Peace smeared internationals participating in a solidarity flotilla aimed at breaking the siege on Gaza, calling their advocacy “performative love-boat activism of people who know nothing of and care even less for the condition of Gazans.”
In the same post on X, the Board of Peace claimed that it had “SIGNIFICANTLY scaled up support for the people of Gaza” and stated that “Hamas’ theft of aid has dwindled from 90 percent to less than 1 percent” – even though it was Israeli-backed militias that had routinely intercepted and looted aid trucks in Gaza in the months leading up to the ceasefire.
There is no evidence to support the claim that Hamas, which says it has lost hundreds of officers and security guards in Israeli attacks while they were attempting to protect aid convoys, engaged in significant theft of aid, as determined by an internal US government analysis and acknowledged by Israeli military officials.
And while the Board of Peace crudely twists the facts on X, its high representative is engaged in slightly more sophisticated if no less harmful obfuscation.
Mladenov’s report to the Security Council on the implementation of Trump’s Gaza plan discusses the blocking of aid in “very oblique, roundabout terms,” Refugee International’s Konyndyk stated during the UN Correspondents Association press conference. “But at no point does it ever acknowledge … the continued pattern of obstruction by the Israeli government in direct contradiction to their obligations under the ceasefire deal.”
Konyndyk said that Mladenov telling the Security Council during his briefing that every element in phase one must be upheld “is a backward way of acknowledging that it has not been.”
“If the guarantors of the deal cannot even hold the Israeli government accountable for meeting basic humanitarian obligations, what realistic prospect is there that the parties will be held to account for the more complicated political and security elements of the deal?” Konyndyk asked.
Bankrupt board
While the Board of Peace’s high representative insists that full disarmament in Gaza is the key to unlocking every other aspect of Trump’s plan, he acknowledged in his report to the Security Council that the billions of funds committed for the execution of Trump’s plan have not been disbursed.
The Guardian reported during May that of the $7 billion pledged during the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace, only $23 million for overhead costs and $100 million to fund a future police force has been delivered – amounting to “$1.75 for every $100 pledged.”
An estimated $71.4 billion is needed for recovery and reconstruction in Gaza, according to a European Union, United Nations and World Bank assessment published in April.
From the beginning, the Board of Peace failed to win over the European Union, which has not joined the organization due to its naked attempt to bypass and undermine the United Nations.
Mohammed R. Mhawish, reporting for New York magazine, observes that “under its own logic, the three active military fronts currently disrupting the Middle East — Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — are theaters of war that should be resolved by the Board, if only they were not being waged by two Board members, the US and Israel.”
Whatever illusion of American protection guarantees that lured Gulf states to join the Board was shattered when the US and Israel jointly attacked Iran from military bases in their countries.
Damage to energy assets resulting from the attacks on Iran and its reprisal strikes on oil and gas facilities in nearby Gulf states may amount to $58 billion for repair costs alone, according to the research firm Rystad.
Gulf states UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were among the handful of countries that made pledges to the Board of Peace weeks before the surprise attack on Iran.
Counting on the US to provide stability is now a harder sell, and the Board of Peace’s empty coffers can be reasonably viewed as a vote of no confidence by states who had initially pledged.
An unnamed source described as “familiar with” the Board of Peace told The Guardian that “the worst outcome is that Hamas agrees to disarmament, and then says ‘go ahead, start delivering’ … What will they [the Board of Peace] do?”
Reuters reported that the US is “considering asking Israel to give some of the tax money it is withholding from the Palestinian Authority to Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to fund the US president’s post-war plan for Gaza.”
The mere suggestion of any such proposal is an indicator of the Board’s desperation and recklessness.
The Palestinian Authority says that Israel is withholding some $5 billion in taxes, amounting to around half the PA’s annual budget. Israel’s withholding of the funds that it collects on behalf of the PA has “set off a financial crisis in the West Bank, with the PA slashing salaries of thousands of civil servants,” according to Reuters.
The real plan for Gaza
The Trump fantasy for Gaza, illustrated with glittery AI-generated graphics by the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, upon the plan’s reveal, has no Palestinian involvement and no money.
It also has no legitimacy.
The US joined the Board of Peace “through an executive order signed by Trump, who invoked a federal statute that normally requires congressional backing for American participation in international institutions,” Mhawish writes.
The Board charter has not been approved by the Senate, which approves international treaties, and the body “has no permanent relationship to any durable US or international institution, as the UN Security Council’s endorsement is set to expire at the end of next year.”
Trump would remain permanent chair even when his term ends and “the next administration would have no viable method to redirect funds, significantly restructure the Board, or undo the plans already set in motion.”
The “multilateral organization … created out of thin air,” as Mhawish puts it, has failed to consolidate the support and funding it would need to actually function.
But in the meantime, the Board of Peace is providing Israel with diplomatic cover to advance its strategic goals: systematically destroying homes in the areas under its control to prevent their displaced residents from returning and to render the landscape unrecognizable and uninhabitable in pursuit of its genocidal aims of destroying the conditions of life for Palestinians in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have not shied from expressing their desire to empty Gaza of its Palestinian population – the majority of them originally forcibly displaced during the violent creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land conquered in 1948.
On 26 May, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, reiterated the aim of “voluntary emigration … from Gaza” – a euphemism for forcible mass transfer.
Israel intends “to end the Palestinian presence in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas leader Osama Hamdan told Drop Site News. “They are trying to send a message to the Palestinians that there is no solution within Palestine, and that the only solution is for them to leave.”
Sara Roy of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern studies similarly told Mhawish, the writer for New York magazine, that the Board of Peace vision for Gaza, as a proxy for that of the Israeli government, is about “eliminating Gaza as the center of resistance, and about ending the whole Palestinian political project to which Gaza is the key.”
Were Hamas and other resistance factions to agree to surrender arms, leaving Palestinians in Gaza totally defenseless, this would indeed be the key to unlocking the rest of Israel’s plan for Gaza, cloaked in the fake language of diplomacy and peace.
Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada
