Gaza’s future is not Washington’s to decide, says rights chief

Nearly a year after the UN Security Council endorsed the Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s transition, questions over who controls it, and in whose interest, have not gone away. For Anouar El Gharbi, president of the Geneva Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (GCDHR), the problem begins with the Board’s origin. It was not born of an independent international process grounded in the freely expressed will of the Palestinian people, he told MEMO in an interview, but of a political initiative led by the US. That origin, he argues, shapes everything that follows: the scope of the Board’s mandate, the powers it holds and the people it answers to. The Board emerged from the “Comprehensive Plan to End the […]