The Trump administration is moving to convene the first-ever meeting of the Gaza Board of Peace on February 19, turning weeks of diplomatic groundwork into a concrete gathering of world leaders focused on reconstruction and fundraising.
The meeting, planned for the Institute of Peace in Washington, will bring together leaders from the 27-member board chaired by President Trump. A U.S. official confirmed the purpose, "It will be the first Board of Peace meeting and a fundraising conference for Gaza reconstruction."
The administration began reaching out to dozens of countries on Friday to extend invitations and nail down logistics. The plans remain in early stages — one source familiar with the discussions noted that nothing has been formally confirmed yet, but the machinery is in motion.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet Trump at the White House on February 18 — one day before the broader summit. That sequencing matters.
Netanyahu accepted Trump's invitation for Israel to join the board but still hasn't signed its charter, as reported by Axios. He remains deeply skeptical of the U.S. plan for Gaza's future, and the reason is straightforward: he wants ironclad guarantees on demilitarization before Israel commits to withdrawal or reconstruction.
Netanyahu claims Trump committed in their last meeting that Hamas would have only 60 days to disarm, after which Israel could resume military operations. That timeline — aggressive by any diplomatic standard — signals that Israel views the Board of Peace not as a substitute for military leverage but as a framework that must operate under its shadow.
If Netanyahu participates in the February 19 gathering, it would mark his first public meeting with Arab and Muslim leaders since before the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. That alone makes the summit a diplomatic milestone regardless of what comes out of it substantively.
Reconstruction without demilitarization is a non-starter — Israel has said as much explicitly. Without it, Israeli forces stay in Gaza and rebuilding doesn't begin. That makes the disarmament question the hinge on which everything turns.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz laid out the administration's vision at a Security Council meeting last week with unusual specificity:
"All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon-production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt."
Waltz went further, stating the U.S. wants to launch an "agreed process of decommissioning of weapons," supervised by "independent international monitors." He outlined an internationally funded program to "buy back" weapons from Hamas members. And in the most striking detail, Waltz indicated that some former Hamas members would be invited to integrate into new government security forces.
That last point deserves a pause. The administration is proposing to fold former members of a terrorist organization into a governing security apparatus — a gamble that assumes deradicalization can follow disarmament. It's the kind of pragmatic calculation that sounds clean in a policy briefing and gets very complicated on the ground.
Jared Kushner, Trump's adviser and son-in-law, previewed a 100-day plan at Davos that covered only initial demilitarization. The full scope of the effort clearly stretches well beyond that window, which makes the 60-day timeline Netanyahu claims Trump endorsed look more like a political marker than an operational deadline.
The Board of Peace was unveiled last month when Trump signed its charter at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22. The reception was not warm everywhere.
Most Western allies didn't join. Some felt Trump was attempting to set up an alternative UN Security Council — a parallel structure that could sideline institutions they still consider essential. The UN Security Council did authorize the board to oversee ceasefire implementation, governance, and reconstruction in Gaza, which gives it formal legitimacy. But legitimacy on paper and buy-in from capitals are different things.
The charter gives Trump sole veto over the board's decisions. For an international body tasked with multilateral reconstruction, that's a notable concentration of authority. Whether it functions as decisive leadership or a diplomatic obstacle depends entirely on whether participating nations view Trump as an honest broker — and whether the reconstruction dollars actually materialize at the February 19 fundraiser.
Meanwhile, the practical realities in Gaza remain grim. Israel agreed to reopen the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, but only a very small number of Palestinians have been allowed through. A Palestinian technocratic government has been established but still hasn't entered Gaza — it's operating from Egypt.
The Trump administration and the other mediators — Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey — are in the early stages of trying to reach a demilitarization agreement with Hamas. That negotiation is the engine that drives everything else. Without it:
The summit is a forcing function. By putting a date on the calendar and inviting world leaders to Washington, the administration is converting diplomatic ambiguity into a deadline. Countries that joined the board now have to show up or explain why they didn't. Leaders who've been hedging on commitments will face a room full of peers being asked to write checks.
Trump chairing a 27-nation reconstruction board, hosting Netanyahu the day before, and marshaling fundraising commitments from global leaders — that's not a photo op. It's the kind of assertive multilateral diplomacy that previous administrations talked about but rarely executed on their own terms.
The skeptics will keep score. But the meeting hasn't happened yet, the invitations just went out, and the administration is already further along on Gaza reconstruction than anyone who dismissed the Board of Peace in Davos predicted they'd be.
February 19 will reveal whether the board is a framework or a facade. The fact that it's happening at all is the story.