Gaza’s future is not Washington’s to decide, says rights chief

Nearly a year after the UN Security Council endorsed the Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s transition, questions over who controls it, and in whose interest, have not gone away. For Anouar El Gharbi, president of the Geneva Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (GCDHR), the problem begins with the Board’s origin. It was not born of an independent international process grounded in the freely expressed will of the Palestinian people, he told MEMO in an interview, but of a political initiative led by the US. That origin, he argues, shapes everything that follows: the scope of the Board’s mandate, the powers it holds and the people it answers to.

The Board emerged from the “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” advanced by US President Donald Trump. The Security Council endorsed the plan on 17 November 2025 through Resolution 2803, adopted by 13 votes with Russia and China abstaining. The resolution recognised the Board as a transitional administration with international legal personality and authorised a set of operational arrangements on the ground.

El Gharbi rejects any suggestion that this grants the Board permission to place itself above the law. Its work, he insists, “must respect the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, the prohibition on acquiring territory by force and the obligations of international humanitarian law”.

Asked whether the backing of the Security Council settles the question of legitimacy, he points to the sequence of events in the formation of the board. “Washington designed the initiative and shaped the framework under which the Board operates, and the Council’s endorsement came afterwards.” This, he says, “raises serious questions about the Board’s independence, about how far Palestinians take part in its decisions and about whether there is adequate international oversight to hold it to account”.

El Gharbi draws a clear distinction. A temporary international framework to support reconstruction, humanitarian aid and transitional administration is one thing; a political trusteeship over Gaza is another. The right to self-determination, he says, belongs to Palestinians, and no outside power can exercise it on their behalf.

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International law, El Gharbi explains, gives no state or international body an unrestricted right to impose permanent political arrangements on a people under occupation. “Transitional arrangements must stay within their mandate, be subject to effective oversight and must not displace legitimate Palestinian institutions or weaken the ability of Palestinians to exercise their political rights,” he says.

Accountability is a recurring concern. Although Resolution 2803 gives the Board an international legal framework, the Board is not a subsidiary organ of the UN. That, El Gharbi says, makes it crucial to spell out who is responsible for what among the Board, the participating states, the operational bodies and the international institutions involved. Legal personality, he stresses, does not exempt an entity from its obligations under international law, nor does it grant unlimited immunity from the courts.

“The scope of any privileges and immunities must be determined by the relevant legal instruments,” El Gharbi says. “They cannot simply be presumed to extend to every act or every official associated with the transitional arrangements.” He warns that Palestinians would pay the price if this is not resolved. “Excessively broad immunities, inadequate accountability, or decisions about public resources and property taken without proper legal safeguards could seriously endanger the rights of Gaza’s population, including their access to justice and to effective remedies.”

On the role of Palestinians themselves, El Gharbi is unequivocal. The Palestinian people, he says, remain the holders of the right to decide their political future and how their territory is governed. Resolution 2803 does provide for a Palestinian technocratic committee to run day-to-day administration, but in his view meaningful participation must go well beyond administrative tasks. It must shape the decisions that determine Gaza’s governance, its reconstruction and its long-term political future. “Shutting Palestinians out of real decision-making,” he argues, “would undermine the political legitimacy of the whole arrangement and raise serious doubts about whether it is consistent with the right to self-determination.”

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Nor, in El Gharbi’s view, does the new arrangement relieve Israel of its responsibilities as the occupying power. “Setting up an international transitional mechanism or a local administrative committee does not, by itself, end Israel’s obligations under international law towards the occupied Palestinian territory,” he says. “The obligations arising from the law of occupation must be judged against the relevant legal criteria and the facts on the ground, and new governance arrangements cannot wipe out existing responsibilities or absolve any party of accountability for violations it has committed.”

El Gharbi also points out that international humanitarian law requires the protection of civilians and the delivery of essential aid. Access to food, medicine, shelter and basic services, he says, must not be made subject to unlawful political conditions that put civilian lives and dignity at risk.

El Gharbi is concerned, too, that continuing violence and obstacles to reconstruction raise questions about the practical effectiveness of the transitional framework, and whether it can protect civilians, support humanitarian recovery and ensure compliance with international law.

This is not, he insists, an argument against international help for Gaza. The danger, he says, is that a mechanism of this kind could reduce the Palestinian question to a humanitarian and security matter and sideline the core legal and political issues of occupation, self-determination and national rights.

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“Transitional powers must not become a way of entrenching prolonged external rule over Gaza, or of cementing its separation from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory,” he stresses. “Resolution 2803 grants only a time-limited authorisation, subject to further action by the Security Council, and this time limit must be respected in practice. It cannot be used to justify open-ended foreign control without the meaningful participation and consent of Palestinians.”

The resolution itself, El Gharbi maintains, must be read and implemented in line with the UN Charter and international law, including peremptory norms and the right of Palestinians to self-determination. It cannot reasonably be treated as a blank cheque for any state or body to decide the permanent political future of Palestinian territory regardless of the rights of its people. 

El Gharbi calls for clear and effective international oversight of the Board, greater transparency in how it takes decisions and a precise definition of the powers and responsibilities of everybody involved, and of how each will be held to account. He also urges human rights organisations, legal institutions and independent monitors to scrutinise how the arrangements are carried out, particularly where they affect Palestinian rights, public property, humanitarian access, access to justice and the ability of Palestinians to run their own affairs.

In the end, El Gharbi returns to the point where he began. No political initiative led by the US, he says, can take the place of the freely expressed will of the Palestinian people. A Security Council resolution is not enough on its own to make an international arrangement legitimate; that arrangement must also comply with international law and respect fundamental rights. A lasting peace, he argues, requires three things: respect for international law, the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and a lawful end to the occupation. Without them, he warns, any transitional arrangement will remain fragile, no matter how many powerful states stand behind it.

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