Initially, US President Donald Trump intended to use his so-called "Board of Peace", or BoP, to oversee peace and reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. The United Nations approved the plan last November by passing UN Security Council Resolution 2803. At the time, legal experts already warned it was a breach of international law.

Two months on, it increasingly appears that Trump plans to establish his BoP independently of the Middle East conflict. In the founding charter published by the Israeli newspaper The Times of Israel on Sunday, the conflict in Gaza was not even mentioned.