The ceasefire agreement that Trump’s Board of Peace is meant to support is not a simple document. It contains explicit commitments, implicit understandings, unresolved questions, and deliberate ambiguities — a combination that has allowed it to hold on paper while its implementation has been deeply contested. Understanding what it actually says helps explain why the board faces such difficult challenges.
The agreement calls for Hamas to hand over its weapons and for Israeli forces to withdraw from Gaza as international forces deploy. It envisions a transitional Palestinian committee taking over from Hamas as the governing authority. It calls for an International Stabilization Force from Arab and Muslim-majority countries to vet, train, and support a new Palestinian police force.
What the agreement did not do is set firm timelines for these steps or specify exactly how they would be sequenced. That deliberate ambiguity allowed both sides to accept the deal while preserving their ability to interpret its requirements in favorable ways. It deferred confrontation over contested questions — and that confrontation is now arriving.
The ceasefire also did not fully resolve the question of what Hamas’s disarmament would look like in practice, who would verify it, and what would happen if Hamas failed to comply. These gaps have created the space for the current impasse, in which Hamas makes conditional commitments that Israel considers inadequate and Israel continues strikes that Hamas and Arab partners consider ceasefire violations.
Trump’s Board of Peace exists partly to fill these gaps — to provide the political and institutional framework that can convert the ceasefire agreement’s ambiguities into workable implementation arrangements. Thursday’s first meeting was the beginning of that process, which is likely to be long and difficult.