US-EU clash erupts over Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace

A transatlantic row over the future of Gaza erupted into public view at the Munich Security Conference, with senior European officials openly challenging Donald Trump’s controversial "Board of Peace", the Guardian has reported.

EU leaders accused the US president of reshaping an originally UN-mandated mechanism into a body that no longer reflects its original legal framework or guarantees Palestinian participation.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said the board as currently constituted no longer reflected the original UN security council resolution.

She said the resolution "provided for a Board of Peace for Gaza, but it also provided for it to be limited in time until 2027, it provided for the Palestinians to have a say, and it referred to Gaza, whereas the statute of the Board of Peace makes no reference to any of these things".

"So I think there is a security council resolution but the Board of Peace does not reflect it," she added.

Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, also accused Trump of attempting to bypass the original UN mandate and excluding Europe from the process, despite the EU being one of the main funders of the Palestinian Authority, the Guardian reported.

The remarks mark the first time divisions over Trump’s Gaza initiative have surfaced so publicly at a high level. A meeting of the Board of Peace is due to take place in Washington next week amid uncertainty over the durability of the Gaza ceasefire.

US officials pushed back against the criticism.

In exchanges described by the Guardian as "testy", Mike Waltz dismissed what he called “hand-wringing” about the Board of Peace and said the status quo of repeated war, with Hamas in control of Gaza, had to be broken.

He confirmed that Indonesia had agreed to contribute 8,000 troops to an International Stabilisation Force, with further announcements on troop deployments expected in the coming week.

Waltz also claimed some countries were not comfortable putting billions of dollars in reconstruction funds through the UN system.

Describing Trump’s approach as "focused multilateralism", he said it had been necessary to "put the UN on a diet and make it go back to basics of peacemaking".

The Trump-appointed high representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, sought to avoid the political row and instead stressed urgency on the ground.

"All of this needs to move very fast. If we do not, we are not going to implement the second phase of the ceasefire but the second phase of the war," he said.

Mladenov said he would not engage with allegations of Israeli genocide and that his focus was improving humanitarian aid, decommissioning weapons held by all factions and ending Gaza’s internal division.

"If we do not address the issue of Hamas and Gaza itself divided into two parts, please tell me how we get to a two-state solution, because I do not see the pathway," he said.

"We are setting ourselves up for complete and utter failure, and the price will be paid by both Israelis and Palestinians down the line."

Democratic senator Chris Murphy raised separate concerns that the board lacked safeguards to prevent reconstruction funds ending up "in the hands of Trump’s friends and cronies", according to the Guardian.

Meanwhile, Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti warned that wider developments in the occupied territories risked undermining any political plan for Gaza.

"The whole of the West Bank has been made open for settlements and Israel is putting the final nail in the coffin of the Oslo accord," he said. "It is not just about accountability for genocide, but who is going to stop this process of killing the two-state solution."