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Trump's Board of Peace Unveils $2.45bn Gaza Recovery Plan

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Trump's Board of Peace announced a $2.45bn Gaza recovery plan at the UN General Assembly, funding 66 programmes as reconstruction stalls.

US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace has set out a $2.45bn (£1.85bn) plan to begin repairing Gaza, announcing the figure at a board meeting held on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York. The money is to be split among 66 separate programmes and spent over a six-month window, targeting housing, diesel-powered electricity and the clearing of waste, alongside other pressing shortages.

Board members acknowledged the sum falls far short of what is needed. Donors have promised roughly $18bn, but only $280m has actually been transferred. The board puts the price of rebuilding Gaza in full at about $71bn spread across the coming decade, and it offered no timetable for when physical reconstruction might start.

The announcement lands almost a year after Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire, and with Trump's wider plan to end the war largely frozen. The central obstacle remains the question of Hamas's weapons. The group has said it will surrender its arms in return for a staged Israeli pullback from the 60% of the territory its forces still hold. Israel has taken the opposite position, demanding that Hamas disarm completely before any withdrawal takes place.

While the two sides remain locked in disagreement, fighting has not stopped. Israeli strikes hit Gaza on an almost daily basis, and conditions for the 2.1 million residents remain severe.

Kushner concedes 'delays on different things'

Jared Kushner, who sits on the Gaza Executive Board and is Trump's son-in-law, was candid about the programme's slow pace, telling the meeting it had run into "different delays on different things, for whatever reason". He framed the gathering as a signal of intent rather than a report of results. "The goal of today was really just to show you that we're really fully committed to doing it," he said.

US envoy Steve Witkoff, also in New York, struck a more upbeat note, pointing to what he called "real progress" over the past year. "All of the hostages are home. There is a ceasefire, imperfect as it may be, but it still exists," he said. "Humanitarian efforts have achieved historic results, with billions of dollars donated and pledged to meet urgent needs and support the long work of recovery."

Beyond raising money, the board faces a stack of unresolved problems: protecting the people who would carry out the work inside Gaza, rebuilding the territory's internal administration, and bridging the gap between Israeli and Palestinian officials.

Speaking at a separate briefing on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said several governments had come forward with financial commitments and that the board was "looking for more that will participate in that".

Ordnance and tunnels before rebuilding

Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli-American member of the Board of Peace, laid out the practical steps he expects to come first. Speaking to the BBC's Newshour, he said the ground has to be made safe before anything can be built. "Because it's a war zone, you need to remove unexploded ordnance. And then there are still hundreds of kilometres of tunnels underneath Gaza which need to be destroyed as well," he said. Only after that, he added, could residents turn to "housing, or better sanitation, or other things".

Warnings about the fragility of the truce have already come from within the board itself. In August, its high representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, took aim at both Israel's continued air strikes and the conduct of Hamas. He cautioned that if the ceasefire agreed last October were to fall apart, it would mark "a point of no return" for the region.

The human cost since the truce took hold underscores those concerns. According to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, at least 1,408 Palestinians, among them more than 300 children, have died in Israeli attacks in the period since the ceasefire began.

For now, the $2.45bn package represents an opening move rather than a rebuilding effort under way. With pledges outpacing actual payments by a wide margin, no start date fixed, and the core dispute over Hamas's disarmament unresolved, the board's central message was one of commitment rather than concrete progress on the ground.

Gaza recovery plan, Board of Peace, Trump Gaza, Jared Kushner, Gaza reconstruction, Hamas disarmament, UN General Assembly, Gaza ceasefire

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