U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace for Gaza now has an administrator. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Jan. 8 that Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov has been appointed as the board’s director-general after meeting with him in Jerusalem. No announcement has come from Trump, but an unnamed senior U.S. official confirmed to AP that Mladenov is the Trump administration’s choice to be the board’s day-to-day administrator on the ground. Trump has already appointed himself as head of the board, while appointments are expected next week, according to Israeli and American officials, also unnamed.
Mladenov is a former Bulgarian defense and foreign minister who served as the UN envoy to Iraq before being appointed as the UN Mideast peace envoy from 2015-2020. During that time, he had good working relations with Israel, and frequently worked to ease tensions between Israel and Hamas.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces continue to kill Palestinians in Gaza, including eight more on Jan. 8, despite the ceasefire. The victims included an 11-year-old girl who dreamed of becoming a doctor, a teenage girl, and two boys killed in a tent camp, and a man whose daughter wept over his body outside a hospital.
