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They Called It Peace. Gaza Never Got a Vote.

Trump's Board of Peace is drafting a legal framework to seize Palestinian property, shield its personnel from prosecution, and govern Gaza without accountability. The people of Gaza have no seat where
A group of men in suits smile in front of a backdrop that reads 'Board of Peace'

The Board of Peace, the body Trump set up to run Gaza, just had its own draft resolution leak to The Guardian. It is four pages, labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” and it does three things.

It grants everyone on the board immunity from any court in Gaza. It lets the board take Palestinian public land for free. And it lets the board judge its own conduct, including cases of injury and death, with no outside court allowed to review it. Section 7 of the draft, titled “Third Party Liability/Claims,” sets up an internal process where the board hears and rules on claims against itself. They wrote themselves a law that puts them above the law.

Six lawyers reviewed the document for The Guardian. Noura Erakat, an international law professor at Rutgers, said it plainly: there is no external oversight, and it creates a legal system unto itself.

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Look at who holds the pen. The seven-member executive board includes Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Marco Rubio. Kushner has already said what he wants Gaza to become: luxury resorts, hi-tech cities, business hubs. The draft resolution lays the legal groundwork for exactly that.

Now look at who is missing. The seven-member executive board has no Palestinian on it. The larger eleven-seat Gaza Executive Board has no Palestinian on it either. Israel holds a seat. The only place Palestinians appear at all is a technocratic committee that handles day-to-day services, and even those people were selected in coordination with Washington and Arab governments, not chosen by anyone in Gaza. The people whose land is being taken do not sit on the body taking it.

And they did not consent to it. Hamas rejected the board’s disarmament plan as unacceptable. The Palestinian Authority and Fatah are not on the committee. Diana Buttu, a former PLO spokesperson, said the plan normalizes genocide. Erakat said its goal is to force outcomes onto the Palestinian people. These are not outside critics. These are the people the plan claims to be helping, and they are saying no.

This is the part that matters. The people of Gaza should decide the future of Gaza. It is their land, their homes, their future. That is not a radical position. It is the most basic one there is. And the structure being built does the opposite. It moves all real authority up to the board and leaves a powerless Palestinian committee to manage the wreckage.

There is a term for this. Disaster Capitalism. A crisis flattens a society, and outside powers move in to rebuild it for profit while the population is too broken to push back. The pattern is not new. Blackwater contractors killed civilians in Iraq. KBR billed the US government for work it never did. The reconstruction industry runs on immunity and contracts, and almost no one is ever held accountable. Gaza is being set up the same way, except this time the immunity is written down before the first contract is signed.

The money tells the same story. Countries pledged billions. Most of it has not been transferred. But the legal protection for the people who stand to profit is already drafted. The order of operations tells you who this was built for.

There is also a practical problem the board is ignoring. When you strip a population of any real say in how it is governed, you do not get stability. You get the opposite. The exclusion of empowered Palestinian governance has already left a vacuum, and the actor filling it is Hamas. Cutting people out of power does not end the conflict. It feeds it.

This is what it looks like when imperialism arrives after the bombs stop. The military makes the wreckage. The political class writes the legal cover. The investors move in. And every step gets described as humanitarian aid and peace.

It is not peace. It is invasion.

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