The White House letter dated 16 January 2026 and addressed to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, together with the public statement by presidential aide Sergio Gor, reveals an initiative of extraordinary political ambition and equally extraordinary legal recklessness. President Donald Trump claims to have designed a “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”, allegedly endorsed by world leaders and welcomed by a United Nations Security Council resolution, and proposes to operationalise this vision through a newly created entity described as “The Board of Peace”, styled as an international organisation and transitional governing administration for Gaza.
What is presented as historic diplomacy is, under rigorous legal scrutiny, an attempt to invent a governing authority over foreign territory without a recognised legal foundation, without demonstrable consent from the affected population, and without the treaty architecture that alone can confer legitimacy on international institutions. The language of peace conceals a structure that, if implemented as described, would collide directly with the United Nations Charter, the law of self determination, the law of occupation, and the fundamental principles that have governed post conflict administration since 1945.
The letter itself is revealing. It does not speak of negotiations with Palestinians, elections in Gaza, or consent of the governed. It speaks instead of assembling “a distinguished group of nations”, of leadership by example, and of building a new governing mechanism from above. Sergio Gor’s statement reinforces this narrative by framing participation as an honour bestowed by the President of the United States, not as a mandate granted by international law or by the people whose lives would be governed by this body.
This distinction is not academic. It is decisive.
Under contemporary international law, territory emerging from armed conflict may be administered in only a narrow set of circumstances. An occupying power may temporarily govern under the Fourth Geneva Convention, but only to maintain order and civil life, and explicitly without altering the political structure or exploiting resources. A transitional administration may be created by the United Nations Security Council under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, as occurred in Kosovo and East Timor, but only through formal resolutions that define authority, accountability, duration and scope. Alternatively, governance may be exercised by the legitimate domestic authority of the territory itself.
The “Board of Peace” described in the White House letter fits none of these categories.
The United States is not the sovereign authority over Gaza. It is not recognised as an occupying power under international humanitarian law. It has not announced that it seeks such status, nor could it lawfully acquire it without direct military control. The letter does not claim that the Board would operate as a United Nations subsidiary organ. It does not cite a treaty establishing the organisation. It does not reference ratification by participating states. It merely asserts existence by proclamation.
International organisations are not created by presidential stationery. They are created by treaties or by formal acts of recognised international bodies. The World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations itself all derive their authority from multilateral agreements ratified by states and subject to domestic constitutional procedures. A body invented by a single executive authority, even that of the United States, has no legal personality under international law unless other states formally constitute it through binding instruments.
The letter refers to United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 as having endorsed the plan. Even if such a resolution exists and even if it welcomes a peace framework, endorsement of a political roadmap does not amount to legal authorisation to establish a foreign governing authority over Gaza. The Security Council does not delegate territorial administration through implication. Where it has done so in the past, it has created detailed mandates, supervisory mechanisms and reporting obligations. None are mentioned. None are published. None are evidenced.
More alarming is the structure implied by earlier disclosures surrounding the Board, which reportedly includes senior United States officials, private financiers, former Western heads of government and close associates of the President. If true, this would constitute an unprecedented fusion of executive power, private capital and post conflict governance. It would dismantle the long established principle that transitional administrations must be politically neutral and institutionally independent.
The legal consequences for participating states would be severe. Any government joining such a body would assume direct responsibility for decisions affecting Gaza’s population. That includes security operations, policing, detention, border management, economic policy and reconstruction priorities. Each of these areas is regulated by binding international law, including the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
If arbitrary detention occurred, members would share responsibility. If property were expropriated without due process, members would share responsibility. If political participation were curtailed, members would share responsibility. Membership would not be symbolic. It would be juridical.
For India in particular, participation would be a radical departure from its long stated commitment to Palestinian self determination and non intervention. It would entangle New Delhi in the direct administration of a territory whose political status remains unresolved, whose borders are contested, and whose population has endured decades of displacement and blockade. No diplomatic language about prosperity can extinguish the legal exposure that follows from exercising authority over civilians in a post war environment.
The absence of Palestinian consent is the most glaring defect. The letter does not reference elections in Gaza. It does not reference a constituent assembly. It does not reference a referendum. It does not reference negotiations with Palestinian representatives. The people who would live under this administration are invisible in the document, treated not as rights bearing subjects but as passive recipients of foreign design.
This is not merely unethical. It is unlawful.
The right of peoples to self determination is enshrined in Article 1 of the United Nations Charter and in both major human rights covenants. It is a peremptory norm of international law. No peace plan, no Security Council resolution, and no presidential initiative can lawfully extinguish it. Governance imposed without consent is domination, regardless of how elegantly it is branded.
Financial markets appear to grasp the implications more quickly than diplomats. European defence stocks have reportedly surged amid renewed geopolitical anxiety linked to Trump’s aggressive trade posture and territorial rhetoric. Investors are not reacting to stability. They are pricing in structural volatility. They recognise that a world in which sovereignty is treated as negotiable property is not a world of predictable legal order.
The Board of Peace, as described, represents a dangerous precedent. If one powerful state can invent a governing authority over Gaza, others will follow. Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, Taiwan, the Sahel and beyond will become candidates for externally administered boards composed of wealthy states and private interests. The rules based international system will be replaced by ad hoc management of broken territories by coalitions of convenience.
The White House letter speaks grandly of history. It should be read instead as a warning.
Peace is not manufactured by committees of foreign elites. Legitimacy is not bestowed by invitations. Law is not suspended by executive enthusiasm.
If this project proceeds in its current form, it will not be remembered as a breakthrough in diplomacy. It will be remembered as the moment when the language of peace was openly repurposed to justify a structure of control that international law was designed to prevent.
The Board of Peace is not a solution to Gaza’s tragedy. It is a legal fiction that threatens to deepen it, while corroding the foundations of global governance in the process.
The Irony of Inviting a Leader with a Contested Record on Violence and Civil Dissent to Govern Peace
The legal and moral absurdity of the Gaza “Board of Peace” initiative becomes even more acute when one considers the historical record of one of the world leaders personally invited to participate, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. The White House letter extending the invitation presents the project as a noble attempt to “solidify peace in the Middle East” and to build a stable future for a people ravaged by conflict. Yet Modi’s own record on responding to entrenched communal violence and civic unrest raises profound questions about the suitability of his inclusion in any body that claims to advance peace, democratic governance and the protection of civilian rights.
According to several media reports in the open domain, in 2002, while serving as Chief Minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi presided over a period of anti-Muslim violence now widely referred to as the Gujarat riots. The immediate trigger was the burning of a train coach at Godhra in February 2002, in which Hindu pilgrims lost their lives. What followed was a wave of retaliatory attacks across the state that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people, most of them Muslims, and the destruction of homes, mosques and livelihoods. Human Rights Watch and other international observers documented that state authorities failed to take timely and adequate action to protect vulnerable communities, and in some instances police appeared to side with or fail to restrain the rioting mobs.
some other reports and analysis, as present in public, done by critics and human rights organisations have long alleged that the government’s response, or lack thereof, amounted to a de facto climate of impunity that emboldened violence rather than suppressed it. A UK government inquiry team reported that the events bore “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and that the state’s inaction enabled widespread atrocities. In 2005 the United States government responded by revoking Modi’s visa on grounds that he was “responsible for severe violations of religious freedom” during that period.
Indian media has highlighted time and again Modi’s later political trajectory including robust rejection of these allegations. He has repeatedly described what occurred in 2002 as a spontaneous backlash following the Godhra incident, and has emphasised that Indian courts have cleared him of criminal culpability after detailed investigations. Domestic judicial findings of innocence, while legally significant, do not erase the broader international debate about whether sufficient protective measures were taken or whether state leadership aggravated communal divisions through rhetoric and administrative priorities at a time of acute crisis. Furthermore, India’s government under Modi has faced repeated criticism from international human rights groups for its response to protests and dissent in general. In the years following the riots, nationwide demonstrations against perceived discriminatory legislation, such as the Citizenship Amendment Act introduced in 2019, were met with forceful policing and restrictions on assembly, especially in Muslim-majority areas.
The decision to invite Modi to a body ostensibly dedicated to peace and democratic governance thus carries a layer of bitter irony. A leader whose political career was shaped by contested state responses to communal violence and whose tenure has been marked by controversial state interaction with protest movements is now being positioned as an arbiter of transitional governance in a conflict zone far from his own national borders.
The inclusion of a leader whose international reputation is entwined with unresolved questions about the protection of civil society is likely to alienate the very constituencies the board claims to serve. Gaza’s population, already deeply sceptical of external intervention, is unlikely to view a governing body that includes figures with controversial domestic legacies as a legitimate agent of peace. Indeed, this ironic dissonance between the board’s professed mandate and the historical records of some of its proposed members highlights a broader problem: the initiative does not emerge from a foundation of universal human rights respect and impartial conflict resolution, but rather from the political calculus of powerful states.
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