Four months after former U.S. President Donald Trump launched his high-profile Gaza post-war reconstruction body dubbed the ‘Board of Peace’, the organization remains entirely devoid of major funding, trapped in overlapping legal and political uncertainty, according to an exclusive new report from the Financial Times published Wednesday.
The FT’s investigation builds on a previous exclusive report from Middle East Eye, which first uncovered that a senior U.S. official involved with the initiative traveled to Saudi Arabia back in April to pressure Riyadh to follow through on a previously announced $1 billion funding pledge to the board.
Multiple anonymous sources, one an Arab official and one a U.S. official, confirmed to Middle East Eye that Aryeh Lightstone — the top American official leading Gaza post-war planning for the board — held direct talks with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan specifically to push for the long-promised donation to be transferred.
Trump first established the Board of Peace in October 2025, immediately after the U.S. brokered a ceasefire to end Israel’s year-long military campaign in Gaza. That conflict, which has left more than 72,800 Palestinians dead according to local health officials, has been formally recognized as a genocide by the United Nations, leading global human rights experts, and scores of world leaders.
When launching the initiative, Trump courted multi-billion-dollar donation pledges from wealthy Gulf Arab states and boasted that the organization would go down as one of the most impactful global bodies in modern history. But the FT’s reporting confirms that four months on, the dedicated World Bank-managed fund created for the board has yet to receive a single dollar in pledged contributions.
Instead of formal contributions through the transparent World Bank channel, the board has only secured small, direct donations sent to a separate JPMorgan Chase bank account. Critically, this off-book structure does not require the board to disclose any information about its donors or the source of funds to its 25 member states, a lack of transparency that has already sparked growing concern among international observers.
This secretive separate funding arrangement is expected to fuel renewed questions about hidden backers of the initiative, the influence unreported donors could exert over post-war Gaza policy, and potential conflicts of interest for U.S. and international officials assigned to work with the board.
Documents and on-the-ground reporting already confirm that as of late last year, Lightstone and his team of U.S. advisors were operating out of two luxury beachfront hotels in Tel Aviv — the iconic Kempinski and Hilton properties — while drafting their long-term plans for Gaza, at a time when the enclave remains under Israeli military occupation and widespread humanitarian crisis.
Among the most controversial plans drafted by the U.S. team is a proposal to redevelop Gaza into a specialized artificial intelligence technology hub and large-scale modern megacity. Critics across the global have widely condemned this proposal as a thinly veiled effort to carry out ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population from their ancestral land.
In a November interview with The New York Times, Lightstone openly confirmed one core element of the plan: building segregated housing for thousands of ‘pre-vetted’ Palestinians that would be confined behind an Israeli military-controlled boundary known as the ‘yellow line’ in the occupied Gaza Strip.
To date, the board has only received small direct contributions to cover basic operating costs and staff salaries. Morocco has contributed $3 million, while the United Arab Emirates sent $20 million to fund the office of the board’s high representative, Nickolay Mladenov, and the team of Palestinian technocrats working under him.
While Trump retains the ceremonial title of head of the board, Mladenov — a former United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and currently a senior leader at the UAE’s Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy — serves as the body’s active top official leading post-war planning.
The FT also revealed that $100 million in UAE funding specifically earmarked for training a new Palestinian police force for post-occupation Gaza remains frozen, with no timeline for release.
Bishara Bahbah, the Palestinian-American businessman who mediated ceasefire talks between the U.S. and Hamas, described the board’s current financial standing to the outlet as ‘really dismal’. He confirmed the organization has not been able to launch any tangible development or reconstruction work inside Gaza whatsoever, noting that ‘there is a complete lack of any funding to enable them to execute anything on the ground’.