Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens to a presentation by Trump administration officials about post-war Gaza at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. January 22, 2026. CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
One by one, they walked onto the stage before Donald Trump joined them. The "founding members" of the so-called "Board of Peace" conceived by the American president to oversee the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip stood silently on Thursday, January 22, in Davos, Switzerland, at the inauguration of what the White House described as an "official international organization."
For more than an hour and a half, the president and his entourage dominated the discussion. There were brief remarks from Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat appointed to represent the Board on the ground in Gaza, and from Ali Shaath, the head of the team of Palestinian technocrats designated to manage the day-to-day affairs of the territory that has been devastated by Israeli strikes over the past two years, following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023.
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Among the 18 leaders attending (out of around 60 countries invited to join this board) were early Trump supporters such as Argentine President Javier Milei and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the few Europeans present, along with his Bulgarian counterpart and the president of Kosovo. Most Arab countries – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Jordan and Morocco – were represented at various levels, as was Turkey. The Pakistani prime minister attended, as did the Indonesian president, whose country had offered to help bolster the international force meant to be deployed in the Palestinian enclave, though the timetable for that remains highly uncertain. Absent from this small gathering snubbed by Western democracies was Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who accepted the invitation but did not make the trip.
