The Board of Peace was supposed to be the Trump administration's big answer for post-war Gaza. Eight months on, the funds are stuck in place, Hamas hasn't taken the least step toward disarmament and a former British prime minister is now being quietly requested to hold it all together.

There's a certain type of diplomatic posting which is not done with ceremony, nor is it accompanied by a publicised term of reference document which has been expanded, but by a quiet phone call and a polite nod from both sides that the original plan wasn't going so well. It seems that Tony Blair has just received that call.

The former British prime minister is taking on a significantly greater role in the multinational U.S.-led Board of Peace, which was set up by President Donald Trump to oversee his 20-point plan for ending the war in Gaza, several sources with detailed knowledge of the situation have confirmed. Blair was never going to be its No. 1 man. That's something that Arab governments made no secret about their discomfort with, given that he made the case for the 2003 Iraq invasion. That door closed before it opened! The top recipient was former UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov. Blair built up contacts in the area over years, however, and when the Trump White House sought a blueprint for how Gaza should be governed after the war, the plan they had drawn up was one of the schemes it was considering. Today, as the whole operation threatens to come to a halt, Blair is being asked to keep it running.

Gazans, the majority of whom live in approximately one-third of the area

This project is almost halfway done, as the difference between those two numbers ($71.4 billion and $17 billion) should tell you all you need to know. Even that amount that has been promised is mostly paper. Only a very small portion of those obligations has been shifted, say officials with direct knowledge of the Board's finances. So far, the USA has pledged $10 billion, and the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have pledged approximately $1 billion each. Diplomacy in the Middle East is all about pledges and disbursements, which are very different, and the reconstruction pipeline is, for all practical purposes, empty.

This is the economic context of Blair's burgeoning role and it is of enormous importance. The Trump plan's architecture is based on a very simple idea: Hamas disarms in verifiable stages, international money is unlocked, reconstruction begins, and the IDF phases out, while a technocratic Palestinian body governs over the Strip. Each step relies on the previous step. When Hamas fails to take a step towards disarmament, which it never has, the whole chain jams. Without verification of disarmament, there will be no funds for reconstruction. The lack of movement results in the failure to give the technocratic Gaza committee, tasked with taking the place of Hamas, permission to go into the Gaza Strip, which remains in Cairo. It's been there for months. But without an entry into Gaza, the very mechanism that was supposed to make the post-Hamas future tangible, remains a purely theoretical one.

Hamas' rejection of verifiable decommissioning, the release of coercive control, and allowing a genuine change of governance is the main hurdle to full implementation.

The Board of Peace has written a letter to the UN Security Council on May 2026 that states

The unused building

Among the lesser known facts in recent reporting is that none of the Board of Peace's internal bodies have been operating as "boards" since the White House introduced them in January, including the Gaza Executive Board on which Blair has been sitting. The panels have not met or functioned in any real way, although individual members have been involved in mediation between Hamas and Israel. This is not a simple detail of operation. It indicates that the whole framework of governance that Trump put forward to the world at Davos and 35 countries have agreed, has been more show than substance.

This is the subject specifically covered by Blair's new mandate. In addition to his new role on humanitarian aid access to Gaza, he will likely face a managerial challenge, in essence trying to make the Board's architecture work, and continue to work his Palestinian Authority reform process. This final component is significant as the political endgame under the Trump plan would be the PA taking over Gaza. A new PA runs Gaza, is in peace talks with Israel, and a two-state solution if anything returns to active diplomacy. Blair has been regularly meeting with PA officials for months. That work still goes on, only now it's with a bigger formal mandate.

Israel has increased its military control in Gaza from about 53 percent to at least 60 percent of the area. International agencies have said the situation is increasingly intolerable for the 2 million people, most of whom have been displaced several times, living in what is left of Hamas-controlled territory. Infrastructure is rubble. In May, the World Bank and the UN jointly estimated that the cost of housing damage alone is more than $16 billion, while agriculture, commercial and industrial rebuilding will cost $19.5 billion. Those numbers will continue to increase the longer reconstruction is delayed.

Politics in the way of the money.

The financial and political stalls are linked. Netanyahu's Government has made it clear that they will not be able to rebuild until Hamas disarms. Meanwhile, Israeli elections are scheduled in the fall, and Netanyahu has virtually no political reason to make any significant concessions on easing his control of Gaza even if Hamas were to accept the Board of Peace disarmament plan, which remains far down the road. Major parts of the ruling party are eager to see Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. The introduction of alternative forms of government is political poison for the coalition.

Meanwhile, Hamas, which has taken the stance of presuming it would be disarmed only in exchange for its political collapse, has refused to accept the disarmament framework. The group's claim that the weapons may not be given without a complete Israeli pullout and firm political pledges makes sense in its own logic. The Board's answer, as expressed by Mladenov, is "there is no third option": Hamas must disarm and Gaza must wait for "whatever time we haven't determined yet". But that binary however forcefully stated, hasn't moved the needle.

It's important to understand also what the Board of Peace represents structurally. As many as 35 states have signed up, but no other G7 government UK, France, Germany, Canada has formally joined. They say they are worried about Russia's possible membership, the Board's broad mandate and the fear that it could be a way to marginalize, not supplement, the UN. The European boycott goes beyond symbolic. European governments are one of the biggest donors in the history of Palestinian reconstruction and humanitarian relief. Their isolation from the Board reduces its sources of funds and its diplomatic mandate, which Blair knows all too well.

Blair's long game

There's a view, which isn't without merit, that Blair's role in all this is itself a problem. The Iraq War follows him around east of Suez. The Arab governments who had been conniving behind his backdoor operations were not ready to have him as the poster boy for an American led reconstruction effort. That is not an argument that has been removed, it just been rerouted. He's being granted authority to run things without a formal job. No announcement will be made. His office did not comment at all on the question.

Silence itself is teaching. Blair's value is his informality, in a diplomatic world in which every symbolic gesture can be interpreted as a provocation, and the mere name of a name on a letterhead can be the flash point of a negotiation. The Palestinian technocrats who are part of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza have been trained by his institute. He has had direct communications with the PA, with various Gulf governments and American officials in several administrations. He talks about institutional governance the benchmarks for economic reforms, capacity building in the civil service, and phased transition planning that are actually needed if any of this is ever going to get from paper to reality.

But how it can go from paper to reality is another story and no one with integrity is very hopeful just now. American diplomatic bandwidth has been occupied with the Iran conflict which is taking the attention off Gaza. In fact, the Board of Peace itself sent a letter to the UN Security Council recently alerting them that if the pledged countries do not transfer their money, reconstruction efforts are in serious jeopardy. The unspoken one is that the international community is making promises it is not going to keep, which is a telling indictment of the way Gaza is being dealt with as a rhetorical issue.

The real meaning of the numbers

$71.4 billion over 10 years. That's the UN's best guess at the cost of a true and lasting reconstruction of Gaza. The Marshall Plan, in 2011 dollars, cost about $150 billion and was able to rebuild Western Europe in under a decade. Gaza is a land of 365 km² and 2 million people. Historically, no such scale of destruction, in terms of the amount of square kilometres, physically. The UN has likened the reconstruction challenge to that which faced the world at the end of the Second World War. But the $71 billion doesn't have to come in all at once, and the body in charge of coordinating and dispersing the funds must be a body which actually exists inside Gaza, and the political situation must allow construction crews to operate freely. At the present moment none of those three conditions prevails.

Blair's expanded role doesn't fix any of that. It does, at best, make it possible to organize the body that would make it happen, in a way that, when circumstances truly change, when Hamas is forced to make a different calculation or when Israeli politics turns, the structure to act swiftly is in place and ready to go. It's a very small goal for a guy who once believed he could "reshaping" the Middle East from the podium of a coalition press conference. But it might be the only realistic one that's there.

The most difficult message to get across about Gaza's situation in mid-2026 is that it's urgent and yet it's not moving. There are 2 million people with acute deprivation. There is money available to start tackling that deprivation, at least in theory. Political will to unlock it doesn't. Into that void, a former British prime minister is being called to fill without fanfare, no press release, and a portfolio that his office will refuse to comment on. However, it is not clear if he can do anything useful with it. One thing is certain - there's a lot of patchwork work to be done on the original architecture of the Board of Peace, which was unveiled with much fanfare in Davos and Washington. Tony Blair has just been given the means.