Exclusive: Internal Documents Show Trump’s “Board of Peace“ Moving to Crush Palestinian Self-Determination

Drop Site is reader-funded — no corporate owners, no outside influence. Your support is what keeps this journalism independent and free. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work . Subscribe Palestinians living in Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, Palestine on May 14, 2026. Photo by Anas Zeyad Fteha/Anadolu via Getty Images. Soon after President Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory tour for “ending” the Gaza war last October, replete with ceremonies in which various kings, emirs, and presidents praised him, Israel made clear it had no intention of respecting the terms of the deal. It continued to kill Palestinians on a near daily basis and began limiting the entry of the agreed upon life essentials to the Strip stipulated in the ceasefire agreement. Nonetheless, Trump pulled off a coup the following month when he got the UN Security Council to endorse his Gaza plan. In an unprecedented move, the council endorsed the deployment of an international force that would not operate under the banner of the UN, but would instead be commanded and controlled by Trump and his private “Board of Peace”—to which states could buy in for $1 billion and receive permanent membership. In the big picture, Trump could wrap the future edicts of his board in the veneer of UN legitimacy. As Israel steadily expanded its military attacks on Gaza and pushed its occupation forces deeper into the enclave instead of withdrawing and repositioning them as agreed, Hamas officials told Drop Site that they heard nothing from the Board of Peace until March. Since then, the negotiations over Gaza’s future have been stuck in a diplomatic netherworld. Despite the pomp and circumstance manufactured by the White House after the signing of the deal and Trump’s promise to guarantee it, the U.S. has refused to hold Israel to any of its obligations. While Hamas fulfilled its part of the deal and handed over all of its captives to Israel, both alive and dead, Israel has repeatedly violated nearly every term of the agreement and has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians since the signing of the deal in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The talks that have taken place have overwhelmingly centered on attempts by the board to force through changes never agreed to by Palestinians, and effectively transforming a limited ceasefire agreement into a broader political settlement premised on the disarmament of the Palestinian resistance and the abandonment of its national liberation struggle. In a report to the UN Security Council in May, the board called disarming the Palestinian resistance “the single factor that unlocks every other element of the plan.” The BoP’s proposal, if enacted, would leave Gaza with only a local police force tasked with internal law enforcement and no resistance forces capable of defending Gaza against Israeli occupation or ongoing attacks. Now, with Western and regional media coverage firmly focused on Iran and the Israeli assault on Lebanon, the current negotiations between Palestinians and the BoP have been almost entirely ignored. But the Board of Peace is continuing to try to chisel away at any possibility of Palestinian statehood through a 15-point “roadmap” it first presented to Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions in April. Drop Site News obtained two documents from the latest round of negotiations between the Palestinians and Trump’s board. The first is the full text of the Palestinian negotiators’ proposed amendments to the board’s roadmap for addressing a range of issues, including the demand that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and their allies submit to total disarmament. The revised document was delivered to the board on June 13. The second document is the response delivered to the Palestinian side last week by Nickolay Mladenov, the BoP’s “High Representative.” Taken together, the two versions of the roadmap offer detailed insights into the extent to which Trump’s board is trying to erode Palestinian insistence that any long term deal must include a clear path to statehood, that Gaza and the occupied West Bank be treated as a single Palestinian territory, and that the rights of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli occupation and annexation be preserved. “What we’re seeing is an attempt, in the shadow of a genocide, to dismantle the Palestinian resistance through all of these kinds of preconditions,” said Abdullah Al-Arian, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar. “The interpretation of this agreement is in the hands of actors who are, for the most part, beholden to prioritizing Israel’s security.” Mladenov, Bulgaria’s former Defense and Foreign Minister, served as UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process from 2015 to 2020. He serves as director general of a research academy that trains diplomats from the United Arab Emirates, Israel’s closest Arab ally. Until his appointment to Trump’s board, Mladenov was also a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank established by veterans of AIPAC. In some recent negotiations with Hamas, Mladenov has been joined by a senior Trump advisor, Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, a hardline supporter of Israel who played a key role in the 2020 Abraham Accords. In their draft, the Palestinian negotiators insist that resolving the issue of weapons can only be addressed as part of a “process that guarantees the Palestinian people’s right to establish a Palestinian state and exercise their right to self-determination.” The board’s draft says only that Palestinian disarmament “shall create conditions for a credible pathway.” The documents also reveal how Trump’s board has embraced a decadeslong Israeli tactic of demanding detailed commitments from Palestinians on issues of security and weapons, while offering only vague suggestions of potential Israeli commitments and providing the Palestinian side no substantive recourse when Israel violates the terms. “Mladenov’s latest response reflects the occupation’s unwillingness to reach an agreement, despite the movement’s compliance with all the demands placed upon it and the significant flexibility it has demonstrated across various issues, including the question of weapons,” a senior Hamas official told Drop Site. He requested anonymity because the Palestinian factions have not delivered their official response to Mladenov. “In its current form, this paper is unacceptable and cannot serve as a basis for agreement.” In a statement provided to Drop Site after this article was published, a spokesperson for the Board of Peace said the organization “rejects the characterization that its efforts are designed to advance the interests of one side over another.” He added, “The roadmap is designed to transform a fragile ceasefire into a durable reality that allows Palestinians in Gaza to live in safety, dignity, and stability. This requires progress in governance, humanitarian relief, reconstruction, economic recovery, and security arrangements capable of preventing a return to conflict.” Hamas officials say the Palestinian factions are currently reviewing Mladenov’s reply to their proposed terms. Hazem Qassem, Hamas’s spokesperson in Gaza, said the amendments proposed in the Palestinian draft and in a series of recent meetings in Cairo were welcomed by regional mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey. “The mediators expressed clear satisfaction with the Palestinian factions’ responses and viewed them as positive positions that could serve as a foundation for reaching a comprehensive agreement,” Qassem said in a statement . “Mladenov continues to approach the file from a perspective close to the Israeli position, a view that was reflected in the proposals he presented during his recent meeting,” he argued, saying that Mladenov’s attempts to alter terms previously agreed upon with the mediators has “hindered efforts to reach a final agreement.” President Donald Trump holds a gavel during a signing ceremony at the inaugural meeting of the “Board of Peace” at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, on February 19, 2026. Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images. A Framework for Surrender Palestinian negotiators have maintained that since the signing of the October agreement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and board officials, particularly Mladenov, have introduced new conditions that were never part of the original terms, including demands that Palestinian resistance factions relinquish their weapons as a condition for reconstruction to proceed and before Israeli forces complete their withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. In May, Mladenov and Lightstone threatened in a letter to Palestinian officials that if Hamas refuses to capitulate to the disarmament edict, the ceasefire terms would be deemed “null and void,” paving the way for Israel to resume its large-scale military operations and halting aid deliveries to Gaza. “It is clear that Mladenov is conveying the Israeli vision of the agreement and attempting to impose it on us—under the threat of renewed war—the continuation of the current humanitarian catastrophe, and ongoing killings,” said the senior Hamas official. “This document is not a framework for an agreement; rather, it is an attempt to impose the surrender that Netanyahu failed to achieve through war.” Israel has committed at least 3,338 ceasefire violations since the October 2025 agreement, according to Palestinian reports shared with mediators and obtained by Drop Site—an average of roughly 13 violations per day. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 3,200 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since the agreement entered into force. Israel has also continued to target and assassinate members of the Palestinian resistance, including the commander of Hamas’s military wing and his successor within ten days of one another. It has severely restricted the movement of Palestinians and the entry of humanitarian supplies into Gaza, permitting only 36 percent of the agreed quantity of aid to enter the Strip. Israeli forces have also continued expanding the “yellow line” separating the areas they occupy in Gaza further westward. Netanyahu recently pledged to expand Israeli occupation to 70% of Gaza and said the ultimate aim is to conquer the entire territory. “There’s so much that could have been done since October of 2025 to stop Israel. We were, back in October of 2025, the only people in the world that had to negotiate an end to genocide. And here we are now in June of 2026, still negotiating an end to genocide,” Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Human Rights lawyer who served as an advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization during the Oslo negotiations from 2000-2005, told Drop Site. “The amazing thing this time is that it’s not even that we’re negotiating an end to genocide with the country that’s perpetrating genocide. It’s that we are now negotiating an end to genocide with a subcontractor.” In public—and in their meetings with Mladenov and other Board officials—Hamas and other Palestinian factions consistently point to the fact that the October 2025 agreement narrowly focused on a ceasefire, exchange of captives, the entry of humanitarian supplies and basic life essentials, and phased Israeli redeployments. Since last October, Hamas negotiators have maintained that they do not have the sole mandate to negotiate on issues that strike at the core of the Palestinian liberation struggle. They argued that discussions over the fate of the weapons held by resistance groups and Gaza’s long-term political future must be negotiated with all Palestinian political factions through a democratic process. Although it was not a requirement of the original text of the ceasefire agreement, Hamas formally agreed to relinquish governing authority in Gaza to the National Committee for Gaza Administration (NCAG), a technocratic committee composed of non-partisan Palestinian experts. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad formed working groups in Gaza to facilitate the transfer to the NCAG. Israel, however, has blocked the committee from entering Gaza and has falsely claimed the deal mandates that Hamas completely disarm as a condition for the terms of the original deal to be implemented. “We want to see this administrative committee present in Gaza and carrying out its work there. Everything that needed to be prepared for this committee to function has already been done,” Osama Hamdan, a prominent Hamas leader, told Drop Site in May. He added that Hamas created a mechanism for handing over power, guaranteeing the security of the Committee members, and facilitating them assuming control of the police. “Despite it being formed and approved, Israel still refuses to allow it to enter, and