Trump’s Board of Peace has abandoned its grandiose plans for some kind of Riviera on the eastern Mediterranean in favor of a tiny “pilot project” at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. “Even the envisaged pilot scheme—involving a temporary camp for a tiny fraction of Gaza’s 2 million displaced people, with a Palestinian administration, police and a small international security force—is not expected to take shape before the end of the year,” that is, after the Israeli elections on Oct. 27, reported The Guardian.
The Guardian traces five months of deadlock in detail: Israeli obstructionism, including daily attacks in violation of the October 2025 ceasefire that have killed over 1,000 Palestinians, and Hamas’s consequent refusal to disarm. That is the ground on which the “pilot project” was conceived. “After five months of deadlock, the far less ambitious pilot plan was hammered out two weeks ago at meetings in Cyprus attended by Mladenov, Lightstone, advisers from the Tony Blair Institute and members of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG),” the paper reports. This is the same NCAG that Israel has barred from entering Gaza at all, though it is supposed to be the governing body for the Strip. “The pilot camp envisaged in the current blueprint would consist of portable cabins for tens of thousands of displaced people in Gaza and would be set up in the buffer zone along the ceasefire line near Rafah.” One observer quoted by the Middle East Eye characterized the proposed camp as a Potemkin village created by Israel “in order to use that facade of ‘progress’ to lend credence to its escalating campaign against the rest of Gaza.”
