Gaza, the Board of Peace and multilateralism’s moral hour

Gaza has become more than a battlefield. It has become the world’s moral ledger, where promises of international law, civilian protection, and collective responsibility are audited in real time. What is unfolding is not merely a humanitarian disaster, though it is that on a staggering scale. It is also a stress test of the global order, and so far, the results are confronting.

I call this the collapse of instrumental multilateralism — a moment when international institutions function only to the extent the powerful allow them to, and Gaza exposes that instrumentality as a political choice, not a legal inevitability.

More than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to figures collated by UN agencies and humanitarian organisations, with women and children forming the majority. Entire neighbourhoods have been levelled. Gaza’s health system has collapsed under repeated strikes on hospitals, electricity grids and water infrastructure. The numbers are no longer disputed; they are documented, verified and widely known. What is in question is not knowledge, but resolve.

Put another way: UNICEF warns that only 1 in 10 Gazans can currently access safe drinking water, the World Bank’s rapid damage assessment says restoring the economy could take over a decade, and UN analysts have warned that under a continued blockade reconstruction might stretch into centuries.

Around the world, Gaza is being read as a signal. From Southeast Asia to Africa and Latin America, it has become the reference point through which millions assess whether international law still functions as law, or whether it has been reduced to rhetoric, selectively applied. The principles invoked with conviction in Ukraine — sovereignty, territorial integrity, civilian protection — appear negotiable in Gaza. Ceasefire resolutions are vetoed. Accountability mechanisms are deferred. The message received is stark: the rules bend when the politics demand it.

The European Council on Foreign Relations and ODI have warned that this double standard is accelerating a collapse in Western credibility across the Global South. Polling by Reuters shows overwhelming global support for international cooperation, yet trust in the institutions meant to deliver it is faltering. Gaza is a central reason why. When the protection of civilians depends on who those civilians are, faith in universality erodes.

This erosion carries strategic consequences. States that once aligned instinctively with Western positions are now abstaining or dissenting in multilateral forums. Younger generations across the Middle East, Africa and Asia are forming their political consciousness around images livestreamed from Gaza: children pulled from rubble, surgeries without anaesthetic, births in shelters under siege. This is not a distant tragedy; it is a formative global moment.

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History offers uncomfortable parallels. Palestine sits within a longer lineage of conflicts where law has served as a delay rather than a remedy. From Namibia to Algeria, international legality was invoked while dispossession continued on the ground. 

What distinguishes Gaza is visibility and speed. The documentation is immediate, the data relentless. UN agencies and women’s rights organisations have described conditions amounting to reproductive violence, citing soaring malnutrition rates, neonatal deaths and the systematic destruction of healthcare. These are empirical claims, grounded in data, not slogans.

Yet the machinery of response grinds slowly. International courts move at a pace mismatched to the urgency of mass harm. Legal findings accumulate while bombs fall. This dissonance feeds a corrosive conclusion: that power, not law, ultimately decides. For states encouraged for decades to invest in multilateralism, that lesson is destabilising.

It is into this credibility vacuum that former US president Donald Trump has floated his most audacious proposal yet: a post-ceasefire “Board of Peace” to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction and, potentially, future global conflicts. According to reports, the plan envisages a three-tiered structure chaired by Trump himself, with membership offered to around 60 states. A US$1 billion contribution would secure permanent membership, and Australia is among the invited members by Trump. Gaza would be the starting point, but not necessarily the endpoint.

Counterintuitively, the proposed ‘Board of Peace’ is less innovation than revival — a return to pre-UN ‘concert-of-powers’ logic that substitutes exclusive club power for universal legitimacy.

Supporters frame the idea as pragmatic innovation, born of frustration with institutions perceived as paralysed. Critics, including senior diplomats, have described it as a “Trump United Nations” — an alternative architecture that sidelines the UN Charter in favour of ad hoc power. Even allies have reacted cautiously. Hungary accepted swiftly. Others have offered polite non-commitment, weighing alliance expectations against institutional principles.

The deeper problem is not personality or novelty. It is legitimacy. Gaza’s future cannot be sustainably rebuilt through structures that exclude meaningful Palestinian participation or treat peace as a transactional commodity. Human rights organisations have warned that governance imposed without consent risks entrenching the very injustices that fuel conflict. Reconstruction without accountability may produce buildings, but not stability.

Strategically, endless war in Gaza is exporting insecurity, not containing it. Radicalisation thrives where injustice appears permanent. Environmental devastation — poisoned water tables, uninhabitable land — compounds long-term displacement risks, as flagged by numerous research bodies. Regional escalation becomes more likely as norms erode. Even climate and development agendas suffer under the weight of prolonged instability.

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This moment demands clarity about what credibility looks like. It looks like supporting independent investigations wherever evidence leads. It looks like conditioning military support on compliance with international humanitarian law. It looks like recognising Palestinian self-determination not as a bargaining chip, but as a legal right deferred for generations. These are not radical positions; they are the foundations of the order repeatedly invoked by its most powerful defenders.

For middle-power countries, Gaza is the moment where quiet influence must choose between comfortable alignment and principled leadership, because when rules bend for the strong, those without vetoes are always the first left exposed. Participation in any new initiative must be measured against whether it strengthens or fractures that architecture.

An immediately actionable signal would be a Global-South-led accountability consortium — a compact of middle and southern states charged to mount independent investigations and deliver forensic reports when the UN is blocked or paralysed.

Gaza has become the world’s loudest question mark. Across the Global South and beyond, it is no longer viewed as a distant war but as a referendum on whether multilateralism still belongs to everyone or only to the powerful. For societies shaped by colonial memory, climate vulnerability and uneven justice, the idea of a Board of Peace is being weighed less for its ambition than for its honesty: will it widen the circle of decision-making, or simply rename control? Gaza’s reconstruction is therefore being read as a signal, not a solution — proof of whether global governance can evolve into something shared, credible and humane, or whether it continues to ask the many to trust a system that rarely trusts them back.

Gaza is now the mirror in which the international community sees itself. What is reflected is not strength, but contradiction. History will not only record what happened there. It will ask what was done when the facts were known, the data uncontested, and the consequences foreseeable.

If multilateralism cannot act when the facts are uncontested, then its crisis is not one of technical capacity — it is one of conviction.

Reconstructing Gaza is possible — materially, socially, politically. The resources exist. The expertise exists. What has been lacking is not capacity, but courage: the courage to apply the law evenly, to privilege justice over expedience, and to accept that peace imposed without dignity rarely endures. In that choice lies not only Gaza’s future, but the credibility of the global order itself.

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