Aug. 3 (UPI) — The top envoy for President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace lamented Sunday that Israeli forces continued attacking Gaza despite Iran-backed Hamas agreeing last week to a disarmament framework.
“My team and I are working around the clock with the parties, the mediators and regional partners to de-escalate and create the space for the full implementation of the president’s plan,” Nickolay Mladenov, former minister of defense for Bulgaria and current director general of the Board of Peace, said in an online statement.
“Achieving a lasting peace is hard but achievable if everyone make their best efforts.”
Trump on Thursday announced that his peace board reached a tentative agreement after months of negotiations secured a commitment from Hamas and other militant groups to disarm in Gaza on conditioned that Israel follows by withdrawing its troops from the enclave.
Israel has all but formally rejected the framework. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and far-right politician, called the tentative agreement “unacceptable to Israel.”
“After the October 7 massacre, the blood of every Hamas member is on his own head. Therefore, a commitment to stop the targeted killings of the terrorist organization’s murderers is tantamount to agreeing to allow Hamas to prepare for the next massacre,” he said Friday in a Telegram statement.
“The targeted killings in Gaza must continue, emigration must be encouraged and Israel must win.”
Israel has attacked Gaza every day since the framework agreement was announced, killing at least 14 Palestinians, including four children, over Sunday alone, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Turkey, one of the mediators in negotiations involving the Board of Peace, said Sunday in a statement that more than 30 civilians were killed in Israeli attacks on health facilities following the framework’s announcement.
It accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of seeking to displace Palestinians from their homes and obstructing any effort to establish lasting peace in the region through his government’s continued steps that “destabilize the already fragile regional balance and undermine the initiatives of mediating countries, particularly the USA.”
“It has now become more imperative for the international community to adopt a more determined, consistent and firm stance against Netanyahu’s expansionist and militarist mindset, which seeks to turn the Middle East into a zone of perpetual conflict,” the ministry said.
Mohammad Dahlan, an exiled Palestinian politicians involved in negotiations on thhe framework, said he was aware that Netanyahu would try to “kill the opportunity that President Donald Trump worked on in collaboration with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey.”
“We worked for weeks and warned against the criminal behavior of the occupation and what Netanyahu might resort to, and today the entire world sees the gravity of the massacre he committed to block the path to the greatest promising opportunity to begin ending the war and establishing the security for our people in Gaza and for all parties,” he said Sunday in a statement.
Trump’s Board of Peace is a coalition of 28 countries, including Israel, weighted toward Middle Eastern and smaller or midsize nations. It was formed in January and is tied to a U.N.-backed, 20-point plan for the stabilization and reconstruction of Gaza, which has been devastated by the war.
United Nations estimates show that more than 81% of all buildings and structures in Gaza have been either damaged or destroyed.
U.N. agencies have said that around $70 billion is needed to reconstruct the enclave, which measures about 25.4 miles long and between 2.7 and 7.5 miles wide along the Mediterranean.
