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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will join Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, a contentious new organisation that the US president has suggested could replace the UN.
The Israeli premier’s office said on Wednesday he would join other “world leaders” but did not say whether his country would pay the $1bn fee that guarantees permanent membership.
Israel joins countries including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Vietnam, Belarus, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Argentina on the board, while Trump is awaiting a response from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is “studying all the details” of the invitation.
Egypt’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi would also join.
Were Putin to accept, he would join Netanyahu in becoming the second world leader wanted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court at The Hague to sign up.
The invitation to Putin has deepened European concerns about the proposal, which appears to give Trump huge powers over the body, including a veto over the Board of Peace’s decisions and the “exclusive authority” to create, modify or dissolve subsidiary entities.
Hungary’s Maga-friendly Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is the only EU leader so far to have accepted the invite, which Trump described to Belarus’s authoritarian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as a “Historic and Magnificent effort to solidify peace in the Middle East”.
The majority of EU states have rejected the invitations. French President Emmanuel Macron said he would not participate because of concerns about the board’s remit, while the German government said a “prerequisite” for its involvement was that the body be “compatible with existing international legal frameworks”. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will not attend the board’s signing ceremony, Berlin said.
A senior Italian government official said on Wednesday that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was unlikely to sign up to the board, as it appeared to violate a key tenet of Italy’s postwar, anti-fascist constitution.
The constitution allows Rome to join and support international organisations dedicated to “an order that ensures peace and justice among nations”, provided that Italy participates “on equal terms with other states”.
But the proposed structure for Trump’s peace board gives the mercurial US leader sweeping veto powers. He is due to chair the board, with the sole power to invite member states and appoint his successor, according to a draft charter. The decision on the peace board has been thorny for Meloni, a rightwing leader who has forged a warm personal bond with Trump.
Originally conceived as a mechanism to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza — much of which was destroyed by Israel over two-and-a-half years of war with Hamas — the Board of Peace has since expanded its ambitions to other global conflicts.
“The UN just hasn’t been very helpful,” the US president said on Tuesday. He said the UN should “continue” to exist “because the potential is so great”, but complained that “the United Nations . . . never helped me on one war”.
For now, this board will sit above a separate “executive board” due to include former UK prime minister Sir Tony Blair, private equity boss Marc Rowan and the US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Below this, another executive board will be assigned to deal with Gaza. This body began meetings this week to discuss the reconstruction of the besieged home of 2mn Palestinians.
European trepidation over the initiative, which the White House aims to announce at the World Economic Forum in Davos, has further strained relations with Trump. The forum has already been overshadowed by Trump’s pursuit of Greenland.
A senior White House official said the announcement of the Board of Peace was expected to go ahead as planned on Thursday at Davos, where Trump arrived on Wednesday. About 35 national leaders were expected to attend, they said.
Netanyahu is not expected to attend Davos, since Switzerland is required by its 2001 ratification of the Rome Statute to arrest him and hand him over to the ICC for trial on the war crimes allegations, which include the use of starvation as a weapon.
The Israeli premier has denounced the charges as antisemitic and claims that Israel has followed the laws of war in Gaza, where it has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to health authorities in the strip.
Additional reporting by Amy Kazmin, Heba Saleh and James Politi
