Feb. 19 (UPI) — President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace is set to meet for the first time Thursday in Washington to hear an update on progress on his peace plan in Gaza.
About 60 invitations were sent to world leaders to serve on the board but only about two dozen have agreed, The Washington Post reported.
“We’re going to have all world leaders,” Trump told reporters Monday. But it wasn’t immediately clear who would be present at the renamed Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace. Trump signed the charter for the board at Davos, Switzerland, last month.
More than half of those who have agreed to come are on the list of 75 nations barred from U.S. visas pending a State Department review, The Post reported.
Also attending will be Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.N. High Representative Nickolay Mladenov. Mladenov is the link to the Palestinian technocratic committee, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.
Two sources told CNN that members will be allowed two minutes to speak, and Trump may ask for updates and opinions.
A senior Trump administration official told CNN that the following countries are expected to send representatives to the meeting, though some will be only observers: Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, the European Union, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Paraguay, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t attending and is sending Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
The board’s charter says that temporary membership is free, but a permanent seat costs $1 billion “in cash funds … within the first year,” The Post reported. It’s not clear if any countries have paid.
But Trump said on social media Sunday that he will announce more than $5 billion pledged by members toward Gaza humanitarian aid and reconstruction and “thousands of personnel” to join the International Stabilization Force as laid out in his peace plan.
A key provision of his peace plan was to completely disarm Hamas, but Hamas has said it won’t give up its weapons until Israeli forces withdraw. And Israel won’t withdraw until Hamas disarms, adding to the fraught situation of peace in Gaza.
“We have not received any draft or official proposals from mediators regarding the weapons of the resistance,” senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told Al Jazeera last week. “The movement has not officially adopted any decision” on the question, he said.
Hamdan said, “resistance is a right as long as the occupation exists.”
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