{"id":414381,"date":"2026-01-17T02:17:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/414381\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T02:17:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:17:11","slug":"trump-names-tony-blair-jared-kushner-to-gaza-board-of-peace-israel-palestine-conflict-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/414381\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump names Tony Blair, Jared Kushner to Gaza \u2018Board of Peace\u2019 | Israel-Palestine conflict News"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump has named former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to his so-called \u201cBoard of Peace<\/a>\u201c, which is expected to oversee the United States president\u2019s 20-point plan to end Israel\u2019s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.<\/p>\n

The White House said on Friday that Blair would be among the board\u2019s founding executive members, alongside Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.<\/p>\n

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The other members are Marc Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management; World Bank Group President Ajay Banga; and Robert Gabriel, a US deputy national security adviser.<\/p>\n

The board members \u201cwill oversee a defined portfolio critical to Gaza\u2019s stabilization and long-term success\u201d, the White House said, including \u201cgovernance capacity-building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large-scale funding, and capital mobilization \u201c.<\/p>\n

Bulgarian diplomat and former senior United Nations official Nickolay Mladenov<\/a> will serve as the High Representative for Gaza, according to the statement.<\/p>\n

The announcement also named members of a Gaza Executive Board, aimed at supporting governance and services in Gaza. Blair, Kushner and Witkoff were also named to the board, along with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, Qatari diplomat Ali Al Thawadi and others.<\/p>\n

\"TheNickolay Mladenov speaks during a news conference in 2020 [File: Menahem Kahana\/AFP]<\/p>\n

In addition, the White House said that US Major-General Jasper Jeffers has been appointed as Commander of the International Stabilisation Force for Gaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jeffers, who is the current commander of US special forces, would lead the force in a range of areas, including security operations, delivering humanitarian aid and supporting \u201ccomprehensive demilitarization\u201d, the White House said.<\/p>\n

While the US has long supported Israel\u2019s demand that Hamas surrender all of its weapons, the Palestinian group has said it wants guarantees<\/a> before doing so.<\/p>\n

The Gaza Executive Board will support the Office of the High Representative and a National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), headed up by Ali Shaath, which is expected to handle day-to-day governance in Gaza in lieu of Hamas.<\/p>\n

Shaath is a former Deputy Minister of Transportation<\/a> for the Palestinian Authority<\/a>, who is from Khan Younis in Gaza but based in the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n

\"AliAli Shaath, head of the Palestinian technocratic committee for managing the Gaza Strip, arrives at a hotel in Cairo on January 16, 2026 [Mohammed Abed\/AFP]<\/p>\n

Hamas had previously said it was ready to abandon its governing duties in the enclave as outlined under the Trump plan.<\/p>\n

There was no immediate response from Hamas and other Palestinian political factions to the makeup of the Board of Peace\u2019s executive board.<\/p>\n

The White House announcement on Friday comes just days after Witkoff announced<\/a> the launch of the second phase of the US-brokered plan to end Israel\u2019s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians since October 2023.<\/p>\n

The US administration has said Trump\u2019s plan is \u201cmoving from ceasefire to demilitarization, technocratic governance, and reconstruction\u201d.<\/p>\n

But Palestinians have questioned what that will mean in practice, as Israel continues to carry out deadly attacks across the coastal enclave<\/a> and restrict deliveries of humanitarian aid, in violation of the US-brokered ceasefire deal that came into effect in October.<\/p>\n

A 10-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy and an elderly woman were killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza on Friday, as members of a planned Palestinian technocratic committee sat down for the first time in Cairo to prepare for the rollout of phase two<\/a> of Trump\u2019s plan.<\/p>\n

The participation of Blair, who served as British prime minister from 1997 to 2007, has also been a major point of contention, after his name was floated as a possible candidate<\/a> for the Board of Peace months ago.<\/p>\n

The former United Kingdom Labour Party leader strongly supported the US-led so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d in the early 2000s, and joined then-US President George W Bush\u2019s 2003 invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n

Kushner, Trump\u2019s son-in-law and another newly-named executive board member, is also a staunch supporter of Israel who previously suggested that Palestinians are incapable of self-governance.<\/p>\n

Kushner\u2019s family also has strong ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Kushner underscored that Gaza has \u201cvery valuable\u201d waterfront property, saying that Israel should \u201cmove the people out and then clean it up\u201d.<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera\u2019s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, noted that some of the people nominated by Trump will be \u201cmembers of both the Board of Peace and of the executive board for Gaza\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would appear from this structure outline that the Board of Peace has the overarching responsibility, but dealing with the nuts and bolts on the ground in transition will be the Gaza Executive Board,\u201d Hanna said.<\/p>\n

Hanna also noted that Mladenov\u2019s role as the High Representative for Gaza shows that there will be a UN component, considering the Bulgarian diplomat was previously the UN\u2019s top envoy to the region from 2015-2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a UN component in this, which is very important, given the differences between the US and the UN in recent years,\u201d Hanna said.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo have the UN viably involved in the reconstruction of Gaza is utterly essential for these boards, the Board of Peace and the administration board, to have a semblance of credibility,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Criticism of the board also emerged swiftly.<\/p>\n

Ashish Prashar, who worked as an aide to Blair between 2010 and 2012, called for rejecting international trusteeship over Gaza, stating in a post on social media that \u201cthe future of Palestine should only be decided by Palestinians\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears the only qualification for joining the Gaza \u2018peace board\u2019 is to have a strong track record of endorsing (and arming) Israel\u2019s project of genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and criminalising those who oppose it,\u201d Prashar told Al Jazeera in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump\u2019s Gaza \u2018Board of Peace\u2019 was just a pilot project. All states who signed off on it are the ones who paved the way for Trump\u2019s next \u2018Boards of Peace\u2019 in Venezuela, Ukraine and any other place the extractionist American regime wants to take next,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump has named former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to his so-called \u201cBoard of Peace\u201c, which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,1258,21751,1259,44,23156,41,39,42,40,772,1690],"class_list":{"0":"post-414381","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-israel-palestine-conflict","11":"tag-middle-east","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-palestine","14":"tag-top-news","15":"tag-top-stories","16":"tag-topnews","17":"tag-topstories","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-us-canada"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}