Presently the men who are supposed to run Gaza are sitting in a conference hotel in Cyprus practising for a job they have not been allowed to start. They have done it once before in a Cairo hotel where they have been staying since January and last week at Ain Sokhna, the resort town on the Red Sea where the entire panel gathered for two days of "preparatory" sessions, according to the leaked agenda, which began with icebreakers. Icebreakers, because there are so many new staff recruited to the apparatus that those intended to rebuild a fragmented two million square mile territory had never even been in the same room.

This is a pretty good indicator of the condition of the Board of Peace, the massive organization that President Trump unveiled with fanfare in Washington in February, and that the United States will lead. Six months later, the heart of its operation, a dozen or more Palestinian technocrats known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, continues to work outside the Strip. No dates have ever been set for their entry. One committee member has said quietly, since the board has barred its appointed members from speaking with reporters, what is clear to all who have been watching: "No one thought the wait would be this long.

The official reason is very pure and unambiguous. It's the one thing that the board's Gaza envoy, Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, has been chanting like a metronome: Hamas's refusal to abandon its weapons is the one obstacle, and “disarmament is not negotiable.” All else reconstruction, pullback, new government is dependent on that one nagging question. It is a tidy story. Also, it is, on the evidence, only half of one.

Speak to the Egyptian, Qatari, and Turkish mediators who sit in the Cairo rooms, and another obstacle comes into view, the one the board doesn't like to mention in its press releases. Israel has been slowly renegeing on its obligations for the first phase and blaming the impasse solely on Hamas, they say. The October 2025 ceasefire agreed to by the Israelis and Palestinians included a return to a "yellow line" which divides Gaza in half. Instead, the line has slowly moved toward the coast, and last month Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the army to take yet another fifth of the land, forcing the population into an increasingly thin strip by the sea. Today, Israel holds much more than 70 percent of Gaza, much more than the truce envisioned, and Netanyahu has been quite clear about how he intends to begin in Gaza. “First 70 percent. We'll start with that,” he told a crowd of people yelling for all of it.

That's the conflict that the whole edifice is based on and it's important to spell it out because the board's own documents won't. The Hamas group is being asked to give up its stockpile of weapons in exchange for an Israeli pullout and a road to Palestinian statehood. But the withdrawal is happening in reverse, the statehood language is the one that Israel will not commit to writing and the disarmament is being called for louder as Israel's hold is strengthened. No one has to have any brief for Hamas which on October 7, 2023 murdered 1,200 people and took 251 hostage to know you are asking a movement to disarm into the hands of an adversary that is spreading, not retreating. It has tens of thousands of AK-47s still in its military arm at the negotiating table, and that's its only leverage. The Hamas negotiators know that. Hence, the best the mediators can hope for is a "yes, but" in which the other side will condition its acceptance of any request by adding demands that it knows the other side cannot meet.

Then there’s the bigger issue, one that no amount of strategizing in a Cyprus resort can fix. The Board of Peace is creating a complicated device to effect a handoff of power that neither of the two actually leversaged groups is particularly interested in allowing. Commissioners for agriculture, health, utilities and tribal affairs. It has Tony Blair's institute running training seminars and providing about eight of his staffers to the Cyprus summit, and his job is growing as the board is becoming more and more dependent on his resources. Now it has former DOGE officials who were brought on for Elon Musk's cost-cutting effort, now working as Gaza administrators. It has a vision of implementing the cash economy in the enclave on a digital wallet and has brought a representative of the World Bank to discuss it. What it lacks is what is essential for all of this to work: the consent or compulsion of the people with the guns and the people with the tanks.

The economics make the gap most stark. Donor leaders agreed in a February meeting to contribute $17 billion towards Gaza's reconstruction. It's only a small portion that has truly moved. As the largest bidders, the Gulf states are now the ones Iran hit in the weeks that followed, and their budgets are now being shifted to defense. The fund cannot easily attract donors elsewhere, as a recent British parliamentary briefing put it dryly, who are not keen on wiring money to a strip still all but under the control of an armed group and are not willing to channel funds through an American board but not through the United Nations. So the reconstruction account stands almost completely empty, while the plans continue, decision papers have been drafted, commissions are already in place, and the "humanitarian camps and temporary communities" are already being plotted on the ruins of Rafah within the Israeli-occupied green zone. The first of the settlements-of-the-displaced would be on Israeli territory, raising a question the board cannot answer: will Palestinians accept to live on occupied territory, and will their own technocrats maintain any legitimacy if they govern under an occupation?

In the meantime the land is waiting for the paperwork. Last week, Israeli intelligence officials reportedly alerted the chief of staff to the fact that Hamas is preparing for the next war, producing hundreds of explosive devices a month, recruiting young men between the ages of 18 and 22, training its elite Nukhba force and reviving its tunnels while smuggling drones from Sinai. The assessment is said to state that "Hamas is strong on the ground. Nobody is threatening it. Washington's response was no and the Army's recommendation was to "freeze" the situation and to keep the board alive. Instead, the Israeli military launches near-daily "responses" to "violations," and Palestinian health officials claim that over 800 people have been killed since the ceasefire went into effect, with the death toll of the war exceeding 72,000 other sources estimate it is over a thousand. In the name of a truce, people are still being killed.

Add in the politics that the board's optimism obscures. Israel has national elections in the fall of the year, and Netanyahu's coalition is built on the premise of a permanent presence in Gaza, rather than withdrawal from it. On Monday, his finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that plans for three Jewish settlements in the north of Gaza are drawn and ready, and only await the prime minister's signature. That's the same minister who has admitted his intention to push people out of Gaza through what he calls "concentrating the population in smaller and smaller spaces. Washington has ruled out resettlement, and it is unlikely that it will be reconsidered, but the mere fact that the man in charge of the Israeli cabinet is publicly planning settlements while the board is plotting to rebuild shows the madness: Two governments developing two mutually incompatible futures for the same square miles. No mediator is hopeful of a breakthrough before Israelis go to the polls.

Even the security scaffolding is stuck on Israeli sign-off. Egypt has pledged to train Palestinian police, four nations have pledged soldiers to an envisioned International Stabilization Force of some 20,000, and the board has been hiring including Moroccan soldiers as the latest. But no one's ready to deploy without Israeli consent and a status of forces agreement with each contributing country and those haven't been forthcoming. A board official states it will be sorted soon and no time frame is given. “Soon” is the house word with no adjournment date is becoming the norm for the institution.

The board doesn't want you to know this is all a giveaway. The envoys were quietly telling Hamas that Israel would respect eight specific humanitarian conditions, an admission that the conditions had been violated, in a document obtained earlier this year. Meanwhile, Hamas has gone cap in hand to Moscow, which, in June, hosted Hamas officials who have been negotiating the disarmament clause and assurances that weapons handed over will not be sold to Israel. In short, the diplomacy has become multipolar because the American-led version has hit a road block.

But that does not mean that the committee's members are not serious. According to all accounts they are putting together all the while concrete plans to put into practice a concrete government, and one of them has said the truth of it: "The longer it waits, the more difficult it is to implement. The unspoken conclusion about the entire operation. The peace architecture of this magnitude, this well-staffed with troops, this so enamored of the strategic offsite should not still be holding icebreakers in the seventh month. Rehearsal is the name of the game when an institution expends its efforts practicing governance without actually exercising it; rehearsal becomes the point itself, and the actors who control the game wait out the clock. This committee will continue to meet. Gaza will continue to wait. And the difference in the two is where this plan is most likely to fail.