The US-backed Board of Peace has announced a $2.45 billion recovery plan for Gaza, presenting a blueprint of 66 projects to be implemented over six months at a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The plan targets urgent needs including temporary housing, diesel power generation, waste removal, education and health infrastructure, and is designed to support President Donald Trump's broader 20-point initiative to end the Israel-Hamas war. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a board member, acknowledged that the effort faced "different delays on different things" but insisted the gathering was intended to demonstrate full commitment to the process. US envoy Steve Witkoff said the group had made "real progress" over the past year, pointing to the ceasefire and the return of hostages as concrete achievements.
The scale of the challenge is immense. The board estimates that repairing the physical damage across Gaza will require roughly $35.2 billion in the medium term and approximately $71.4 billion over the next decade. Fundraising has fallen far short: while $18 billion has been pledged internationally, only $280 million has actually been handed over. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said additional countries had stepped forward with financial commitments, though more participation was being sought. Board member Michael Eisenberg outlined the practical sequencing required before rebuilding can begin in earnest, noting that unexploded ordnance must first be cleared and hundreds of kilometres of tunnels beneath Gaza destroyed.
The plan faces deep structural obstacles beyond funding. The Israeli military now occupies roughly 60 percent of Gaza's territory, an international peacekeeping force has yet to deploy, and a new apolitical Palestinian administration — central to the Trump plan — has not entered the territory. The majority of Gaza's population continues to live in tent camps or the ruins of their former homes. Hamas has not disarmed, a step the board's high representative Nikolay Mladenov has described as a prerequisite for progress, though he has also pressed Israel to scale back its military operations. Netanyahu has said Israeli forces will remain until Hamas is "genuinely" disarmed, a position that has stalled ceasefire negotiations.
Violence has continued despite the ceasefire. At least 1,381 to 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, have been killed in Israeli strikes since the truce took effect, according to Gaza's health authorities, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations. UN Secretary-General António Guterres used the occasion of the General Assembly to warn that the two-state solution was at risk of collapse, citing ongoing Israeli settlement expansion and what he described as the systematic erosion of conditions for a viable Palestinian state. "There is simply no alternative," Guterres said, "and time is running out." French President Emmanuel Macron and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also used the forum to call for urgent action on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The reconstruction announcement represents an attempt to inject momentum into a process that has largely stalled since the ceasefire began in October 2025. Whether the funding gaps can be closed, the security conditions stabilised and the political impasses resolved remains deeply uncertain — but the Board of Peace used the UN platform to signal that it is pressing ahead regardless.