President Trump's Board of Peace was formally established...

Editor's note: ...on January 22, 2026, more than a month before the US launched military operations against Iran on February 28, 2026. The sequence of events indicates that the administration put the institutional framework in place before hostilities began rather than creating it in response to the conflict. Establishing such a governing body in advance is consistent with long term strategic planning, suggesting that post conflict administration and political objectives were considered before military operations commenced. The timing demonstrates that planning extended beyond the battlefield and included preparations for what would follow if military action achieved its objectives. Furthermore, Hamas and, reportedly, Hezbollah have agreed to lay down their weapons (this is a linked ZeroHedge article) under the proposed peace framework, a development that would be unprecedented if fully implemented. For organizations that have long defined themselves through Iran and armed resistance, voluntarily disarming would represent a historic shift with significant implications for regional security and the prospects for a lasting political settlement. Does this mean that funding for Hamas and Hezbollah is being squeezed? Independent verification of any disarmament and the long term durability of such agreements will ultimately determine their significance. Why would Israel's Netanyahu "kill Trump's Board of Peace" (see The Shadow Government Steering America's Iran War).

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Israel's Ghoulish Settlers Eye Up Gaza, As Netanyahu Kills Trump's Board of Peace

by Andy Worthington | July 29, 2026 

Reprinted from Andy Worthington's website.

On Sunday evening (July 19), a group of some of the most repulsive, ghoulish people on the face of the earth marched towards the perimeter fence separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world to declare their intention to re-colonize Gaza, to re-establish three Israeli settlements that were dismantled in 2005 when, under Ariel Sharon, 21 settlements in total were abandoned, occupied, at the time, by 8,000 Israeli settlers.

These fanatical Israeli settlers, on what was billed as the "March of Thousands", although only a few hundred people attended, were led by the two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government — Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister for National Security, who is in charge of Israel's prisons, which, for Palestinians, have become a gulag of torture facilities since October 7, 2023, and Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, and also the minister in charge of settlement affairs within the Defense Ministry, who has played a huge role in the ever-growing, and ever more violent expansion of Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Speaking at the rally, Ben Gvir said:

"If someone had said three years ago that we would control 70% of the Gaza Strip, no one would have believed it. So today I say: there will be Jewish settlement throughout Gaza. We are returning home. Gaza is ours."

Smotrich, meanwhile, warned that a change of government in the forthcoming elections in October, could "roll back all the Zionist and national settlement revolution” undertaken over the last four years.

The two men were accompanied by more than two dozen ministers and legislators, as well as the 80-year old settler fanatic Daniella Weiss, who told the crowd:

"They ask me, 'What will happen to the Arabs in Gaza?' There will be no Arabs in Gaza, unequivocally."

Netanyahu's reticence in the face of selective western outrage about the West Bank

Although Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party was listed as a sponsor of the rally, Netanyahu was noticeably silent about it. This, undoubtedly, wasn't because he fundamentally opposes the settlers’ aspirations to re-colonize Gaza, but because, while western countries have been and continue to be largely indifferent to the almost immeasurable military slaughter and destruction in Gaza, they have been far more outspoken about settler activities in the West Bank.

On May 28 this year, the EU imposed sanctions on three individuals and four violent settler movements, including Daniella Weiss and her Nachala Settlement Movement, which, as they described it, "encourages and facilitates coercive acts that lead to the forced displacement of Palestinians", and whose "outposts obstruct access to Palestinian agricultural and grazing land and have been persistent sources of settler violence."

Netanyahu is also aware that both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were sanctioned last June by the governments of the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway "for their repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian civilians" in the West Bank, followed by Slovenia and the Netherlands in July, and Spain in September, even though neither man has yet been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court — for war crimes and crimes against humanity — as is the case with Netanyahu himself, and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

While the IDF sought to prevent the settlers' rally, designating the surrounding area as a "closed military zone" for 24 hours, and setting up barriers with the military police, which the settlers mostly managed to avoid, it would be unwise to think that Israel Katz, Israel's current defense minister, is unsympathetic to the settlers' cause.

Tiresomely well known for identifying any gathering of Palestinians or Lebanese as a "terror nest", Katz said, just last week, on Israel's Channel 14:

"I intend to establish three Nahal outposts, which is also a military entity, in those places that were in northern Gaza" — a reference to military bases that, as Nour Odeh explained for Al Jazeera, "combine farming with an armed presence in a bid to consolidate control over a territory."

Although the settlers claimed that they were "returning home after 21 years," as a banner declared, this is nothing but historical revisionism, as the decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005 was an act of deliberate "disengagement" that was meant to stymie further Palestinian demands, as Belén Fernández explained in May last year.

Psychotic indifference to genocide — from Israel to Jared Kushner

What was particularly sickening about Sunday's rally was the gleeful indifference of those gathered — as a beautiful sunset incongruously lit up the sky — to the fact that they were overlooking a vast concentration camp, the size of east London, which is littered with the buried corpses of at least 10,000 Palestinians.

Almost all civilians, they remain buried under 60 million tonnes of debris — "20 times the combined amount generated by conflicts worldwide since 2008", in the Guardian's words — which has been created as a result of Israel's still-unending 33-month genocidal assault, in which, at the barest minimum, over 73,000 Palestinians, again, overwhelmingly civilians, have been killed.

Please go to AntiWar to continue reading.

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There is a lot more going on between the US and Israel than most realize:

Section 219: More Than a Defense Provision – The Battle Over the Future of US-Israel Relations

Here is a result of the ongoing reshuffling of the geopolitical circumstances in the Middle East. It's sort of like make peace between yourselves or kill each other because the US is no longer going to be your protectorate:

As all powers fail them, Gulf States turn to self help

Then on the extreme end of circumstances comes this:

The Diabolically Deranged, Incurably Genocidal, and Apocalyptically Dangerous Jewish Brain… Israeli Professor Advocates raping Palestinian women and girls as 'deterrent'