Who Holds the Purse Strings
U.S. President Donald Trump's Board of Peace for the Gaza Strip says it cannot properly operate its institutions because the money it was promised has not arrived. In a semi-annual report submitted late last week to the UN Security Council and obtained by Haaretz, the Board of Peace said it has not received part of the funding promised to it upon its establishment in February from a number of countries, primarily the United States and Gulf states.
The report lays out the familiar architecture of top-down control: a board created by presidential power, dependent on state and regional patrons, now admitting it cannot function because the promised cash has not been transferred. For the people in Gaza, the hierarchy is not abstract. Decisions made in Washington and by Gulf states determine whether reconstruction even gets off the ground.
What the Board Admits
In a report submitted to the UN Security Council, the Board of Peace noted it is awaiting a significant portion of $17 billion promised by the U.S. and Gulf states for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. That money, at least on paper, was supposed to support the rebuilding effort. In practice, the report says the promised funding for the Gaza reconstruction effort has not been transferred to the relevant authorities.
The language is bureaucratic, but the meaning is blunt: the apparatus announced a plan, the patrons promised billions, and the transfer never happened. The result is not just a bookkeeping problem. It is a delay imposed from above on a population whose survival and recovery are treated as a matter of funding streams and institutional permission.
The People at the Bottom Wait
The report does not describe any grassroots mechanism, mutual aid network, or locally organized alternative in the material provided. What it does show is a system where reconstruction is filtered through state-backed institutions and international bodies, while the actual transfer of resources remains controlled by the powerful.
The Board of Peace was established in February, and by late last week it was already telling the UN Security Council that it lacked the funds to properly operate its institutions. That timeline captures the fragility of projects built from the top down: they depend on the continued cooperation of governments and donors, not on the needs of the people they claim to serve.
The promised $17 billion is described as coming from the U.S. and Gulf states, but the report says the money has not been transferred to the relevant authorities. In other words, the promise exists; the rebuild does not. The gap between announcement and delivery is where ordinary people are left to absorb the consequences.
The Machinery of “Peace”
The Board of Peace’s own report to the UN Security Council is the central fact here. It is an admission that the institutions built to manage Gaza’s reconstruction are already constrained by funding shortfalls and by the decisions of states that control the money. The board’s inability to properly operate its institutions is not presented as a political crisis by the people most affected, but as an administrative problem inside the machinery of power.
That machinery is being run through the UN Security Council, through promised contributions from the United States and Gulf states, and through a board established by U.S. President Donald Trump in February. The hierarchy is clear enough without embellishment: those at the top promise, delay, and decide; those below wait for reconstruction that has not been delivered.
The report’s own wording leaves little room for the usual theater of benevolence. The funding was promised. The funding was not transferred. The institutions cannot properly operate. And Gaza remains caught in the gap between elite declarations and material reality.