Addressing UN, Trump lauds his Gaza ceasefire for saving ‘thousands of lives’

UNITED NATIONS — US President Donald Trump touts the ceasefire-hostage release deal he secured last year in Gaza as well as his establishment of the Board of Peace, which is tasked with overseeing the postwar rebuild of the Strip.

“One year ago, when I addressed the great leaders in this hall, the war in Gaza was still raging brutally. The hostages were still deep in Hamas tunnels, and there was no end in sight,” he says in his remarks before the UN General Assembly.

“But here on the sidelines of the General Assembly, we took the first steps. It changed everything,” Trump says, referring to a meeting he held with the leaders of Arab and Muslim-majority countries where he secured their support for his plan to end the Gaza war.

“A few weeks later, we ended the war in Gaza, saving untold thousands of lives. We also brought home all remaining hostages — both living and dead, every single one of them,” he continues, thanking the UN Security Council for subsequently endorsing his 20-point plan for rehabilitating the Gaza Strip and granting a mandate to his newly formed Board of Peace to oversee the Gaza rebuild.

That plan has struggled to get off the ground — first amid Hamas’s refusal to accept the Board of Peace’s disarmament plan. Hamas accepted the proposal on July 30, but it has since stalled amid Israeli insistence that the initiative isn’t sufficient.

Trump touts the 30 countries that have agreed to join the board, giving specific shout-outs to Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Uzbekistan, which have agreed to contribute billions of dollars toward Gaza’s reconstruction. The vast majority of those funds, however, have not actually been transferred.

“That money goes right to the source — right where they need it, and they desperately need it,” Trump insists. Board of Peace supporters “want to see the humanitarian thing happen properly.”

He then thanks Indonesia, Morocco, Albania, Kosovo and Kazakhstan for agreeing to contribute troops to the Board of Peace’s International Stabilization Force, which will be tasked with phasing out the IDF from Gaza and securing the Strip’s borders.

Indonesia had frozen its plans to join the ISF, though a Board of Peace official told The Times of Israel earlier this month that engagement with Jakarta on the matter has picked back up.

No foreign troops are currently stationed in Gaza, though, with Israel also blocking such deployment. There is also no timeline for when the ISF will even begin to train.

Trump goes on to thank Egypt and Jordan, which will be helping train members of the new Palestinian police force for Gaza. That training has been held up, however, as Israel has refused to allow recruits to leave the Strip to train in Egypt.