Statement on President Trump’s Board of Peace & the Continuing Genocide in Palestine

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security is utterly horrified by the failure of the so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza, the continued wanton killing of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza and the Occupied Territories, the plans to sell off Palestinian land to developers without any Palestinian control or input, and the establishment of a so-called “Board of Peace” that functions mainly to conceal genocide. The situation in Palestine is truly dystopian and must not be allowed to continue.

In our statement from October 14 October 2025 we warned that “ceasefires and peace deals must not devolve into deals brokered by genocidaires to benefit themselves or their fellow genocidaires’ colonial projects at the expense of victim populations.” Unfortunately, this is precisely what has occurred. Throughout the so-called “ceasefire,” Israel has continued to pursue genocide in Gaza using techniques less evident and dramatic than mass bombardment. Humanitarian aid is minimal, living conditions are horrific, medical facilities are nearly non-existent, Israeli bombings continue to take lives, and Palestinians’ access to the outside world continues to be severely limited. Israel is taking more and more land in Gaza as part of its invisible “yellow line” and Gazans are being concentrated in an ever-narrowing portion of the strip. Although the nightmarish daily bombardment of Gaza has not resumed, Israel has continued its bombing campaigns, killing 601 people in Gaza since the October “ceasefire.” Israel has violated the term of the ceasefire agreement over 969 times.

Israel and the United States recognized that the mass murder form of genocide was galvanizing grassroots support for Palestine the world over, potentially destabilizing Israel’s position in the Middle East and undermining U.S. President Trump’s support from his MAGA base at home. They switched tactics and language away from “defensive war” and its justifications towards a lexicon borrowed from international diplomacy and humanitarianism. However, as has become abundantly clear, President Trump’s “Peace Plan” is nothing but a real estate deal that will transfer Palestinian land into the hands of outsiders. Palestinians, to the extent they are allowed to stay on their ancestral land, will fill only the lower-level roles of administration and economic life. This is not about peace but about violent exploitation.

The world is learning more about the unimaginable horrors that have occurred within Gaza over the last 28 months, even though Israel continues to bar international journalists from entering Gaza. Al-Jazeera has recently revealed that Israel has been using US-made thermal and thermobaric weapons in Gaza since October of 2023, which can exceed 3,500 degrees celsius. Such weapons have effectively evaporated over 2,800 Palestinians, instantly reducing their bodies to ash. One woman who had searched days for her son’s body with no success said, "[w]e found nothing of Saad. Not even a body to bury. That was the hardest part.” Customary international law obliges all parties to take all possible measures to facilitate the return of remains to their families upon request.

Whilst not outright prohibited under international law, the use of thermobaric weapons – also known as vacuum bombs – is highly controversial. Customary international law requires states to minimize the impact on civilians, and avoid using thermobaric weapons in populated or urban areas wherever possible. Israel has dropped these bombs onto a city that is home to millions, and sometimes directly onto homes.

There is evidence that the deintensification of direct violence by Israeli forces in Gaza was followed by an escalation of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. In early February of 2026, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) stated that the West Bank is suffering a “silent war” and that flagrant violations of international humanitarian law have been normalized in the region over the past two years. Although the West Bank has been the site of illegal settlement and settler attacks for decades, the violence and number of settlers have increased unprecedentedly since October of 2023. As of 6 February 2026, the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) verified that Israeli forces and settlers have killed 1,054 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023. Over the same time period, Israel has also displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their West Bank homes or from refugee camps.

The OHCHR released an advanced unedited report on 16 February 2026 on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluding that the actions of Israeli security forces and the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank amount to racial segregation and apartheid. These actions, when considered together with settler violence committed with impunity, also raise serious concerns of ethnic cleansing, according to the OHCHR.

Violence in the West Bank has increased even more since the October 2025 ceasefire. In October 2025 alone Israeli settlers committed 260 attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank — the most recorded attacks in a single month since 2006. Settler violence, intimidation, and harassment have continued to force large numbers of Palestinians, including entire communities, to flee their homes. In early November 2025, settlers set fire to a mosque in the West Bank, burned copies of the Quran, and sprayed racist slogans on its walls. The Palestinian olive harvest in October and November, when Palestinians attempt to access their own farmland to harvest olives from ancient trees that belong to them, is usually marked by increased settler violence, but the levels of violence this year were record-breaking.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that the settlers committing acts of violence represent a small minority and that their violence will be met with “the full force of the law.” However, according to Israeli peace activist Aviv Tatarsky, the perpetrators have been acting with “total impunity.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has publicly supported expansion of illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories since the 1990s. Between 2009 and 2020 his governments oversaw construction of 23,696 settlement units. In 2023, his government set an all time annual record for new settlements in the first six months alone. Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack gave Netanyahu precisely the opportunity he needed to begin the realization of his Greater Israel project.

The Israeli government has been directly responsible for recent violence in the West Bank. In January of 2026, Israeli authorities began demolishing the site of the UNRWA compound in East Jerusalem, with plans to turn it into a new Israeli settlement. On 26 January 2026, the site was set ablaze, although it is as yet unclear who committed the act of arson. Israel has no legal claim to the site, and any Israeli settlements there are illegal under international law. Furthermore, an attack on a United Nations agency is a direct contravention of international law. This attack also follows an October 2025 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice explicitly reminding Israel of its obligations to respect the privileges and immunity enjoyed by UNRWA personnel and property and of its lack of jurisdiction in East Jerusalem.

UNRWA’s mandate is to provide humanitarian relief to Palestinian refugees or other displaced persons in the region. The Lemkin Institute finds it unconscionable to target such an agency and describe its personnel as “supporters of terror” as Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir did during his visit to the demolition site.

The settlement on the UNRWA site is only one example of planned Israeli expansions in the area. According to the Israeli anti-settlement organization Peace Now, the Israeli government approved plans in early February 2026 to expand Jerusalem into the West Bank. The Israeli government is positioning the planned project as a “neighbourhood” of the nearby Adam settlement. However, according to Peace Now, this is a cover-up: the planned settlement is not physically connected to the Adam settlement, but rather to Jerusalem itself. This is in fact an annexation of part of the West Bank. It would be the first time that Israel has expanded its territory into the West Bank since 1967. The Lemkin Institute reminds the Israeli government that any extension of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank is contrary to international law.

In addition to drafting plans to illegally seize land, the Israeli government has also recently been working on genocidal legislation which imposes a mandatory death penalty for any Palestinian prisoner who has been convicted of killing Israelis. It would subject hundreds of Palestinians currently held or imprisoned to death by execution. This would include many held in connection with October 7, 2023, who have been denied procedural rights. The imposition of any new punishment for crimes already committed or allegedly committed is directly contrary to the fundamental legal principle of non-retroactivity. Any law imposing a mandatory death sentence is in breach of customary international law, even for states like Israel which have not abolished the death penalty. International law expert Professor Ramzi Odeh has stated that the proposed law constitutes “apartheid legislation” in its differentiation between Palestinians and all others. The enactment of this bill, and the carrying out of mass executions against persons who have not been granted due process, would be yet another horrific example of genocidal actions carried out by Israel.

The Lemkin Institute reminds the world of Raphael Lemkin’s conceptualization of genocide in his 1943 work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which was a study of Nazi occupation policies. In this book, where he first mentioned the term ‘genocide,’ he defined the crime as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” He noted that “[t]he objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.” Such a process has been ongoing against Palestinians for decades, but became more concentrated and intense since October 7, 2023.

A lesser-known aspect of Lemkin’s definition of genocide that has direct relevance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank is his explicitly settler colonial understanding of the process. In Axis Rule he elaborated on the definition above by identifying “two phases” of genocide: 1) the “destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group” and 2) “the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.” Importantly, Lemkin understood that the national pattern of the oppressor can be imposed on the oppressed population while it is still “allowed to remain or upon the territory alone.” It can also be imposed after the oppressed group has been removed from the territory and the territory has been “coloniz[ed] by the oppressor's own nationals.” We have seen President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu vacillate between these two options over the past two years, but each option is in and of itself genocidal in nature.

Against this backdrop, it is blatantly clear that, far from mapping out a peaceful future for Palestinians, Trump’s Peace Plan instead fits right into Lemkin’s genocide framework. It sets out a “coordinated plan” that is administrative, economic, territorial, and demographic in nature, thereby aiming to dismantle the manifold foundations of Palestinian national existence. As Lemkin has made crystal clear in his analysis, territory is more than just physical space. It forms the material basis of national existence. Trump’s framing of Gaza as a real estate opportunity thus lays bare the settler-colonial logic of the Peace Plan, in which ancestral land and natural resources are reduced to an economic opportunity for exploitation.

Palestinian sovereignty or self-determination has no place in Trump’s Peace Plan. Instead, in accordance with the colonizer’s logic, their existence would be reduced to that of low-status participants in an externally controlled society that is meant to replace their own.

When we understand that genocide is not only achieved by mass killings, but also through institutional restructuring imposed by an external power, the genocidal character of the Board of Peace becomes apparent. Its current and invited members, among them various states involved in genocidal campaigns, such as the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia, and Israel itself, underscore this reality. According to its Charter, the US-led entity sets out to “promote stability, restore [...] lawful governance, and secure enduring peace.” Although the Board of Peace defines itself as an “international organization” – meaning it has “an explicitly expressed international legal personality” – its legitimacy as such is dubious. Moreover, in its structure and composition, the Board functions as a tool to advance the genocidal and settler-colonial logic explicitly described by Lemkin. The main Executive Board of the Board of Peace is made up entirely of people from outside the region, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and US Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gabriel. Although the separate Gaza Executive Board includes some regional stakeholders like Qatari diplomat Ali Al-Thawadi and General Hassan Rashad, Head of Egypt's General Intelligence Service, Palestinian representation is completely absent from either Executive Board. ​

The one-sidedness of this entire venture is captured in the stated role of the proposed International Stabilization Force (ISF), which will operate under the command of U.S. Major General Jasper Jeffers. Its role is to "establish security, preserve peace, and establish a durable terror-free environment" but it will only operate in Gaza — not in Israel, which is a major source of terror and insecurity for Palestinians and for people in the region more broadly.

Although ostensibly recognizing that lasting peace requires a people to “take ownership and responsibility over their future,” the power exercised by the Board of Peace, partially implemented by Trump’s Peace Plan, effectively negates any Palestinian sovereignty or self-determination. Instead, the native population is transformed into an externally managed population living under the administrative, economic and institutional governance of the genocidaires. The transitional government appointed by the Board of Peace to take over from Hamas is made up of Palestinian technocrats based in Cairo and being trained at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The latter Institute is funded in large part by Larry Ellison, the American billionaire, “CEO of everything,” founder of Oracle, co-owner of TikTok, and father of David Ellison, who owns CBS and installed genocide supporter Bari Weiss as its editor-in-chief. Both of the Ellisons are blind supporters of Israel. Larry Ellison is the single largest private donor to the Friends of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) organization.

We cannot be fooled by the old myth that disguises colonization as development or genocide as progress. On 22 January 2026, during a signing ceremony at the World Economic Forum for the Board of Peace, Trump presented his vision for a “New Gaza” featuring dedicated zones reserved for tourism, industrial complexes, and data centers. While shamelessly disclosing his true motives, calling himself a “real estate person at heart,” Trump dared his listeners to imagine what Gaza, “a beautiful piece of property,” could be for so many people. But we dare him, we dare our readers, to imagine what Gaza already is for so many people: ancestral land, identity, home.

It has now become clear that President Trump’s plans for genocidal cultural imposition in Gaza are not even limited to what he can weakly disguise as “peaceful” development. The Guardian and the New York Times reported in late February 2026 that he has plans to build a 5,000 person military base in Gaza. Palestinians daring to live in their homeland will be subject to permanent military control and surveillance by the USA.

Lemkin’s words remind us that where the colonizer wants to enforce his new visions, new infrastructure, and new institutions, we cannot close our eyes to the peoples whose collective existence will lie destroyed beneath the rubble.