DONALD Trump’s Board of Peace is funding the removal of rubble from Gaza mixed with the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide, a Palestinian researcher has said, describing the operation as a means to destroy evidence of war crimes while clearing the ground for annexation and settlement.
Muhammad Shehada, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on 27th August that the board is ‘paying the expenses of the Israeli military’s covert transfer of rubble (mixed with dead bodies) out of Gaza.
‘The money is taken from Gaza’s reconstruction funds,’ he said in a post on X.
Only the US, Morocco and the UAE have so far put any money into the board.
EU diplomats told Shehada: ‘Israel has been quietly moving hundreds of thousands of tons of rubble mixed with dead bodies out of Gaza to bury evidence of its genocide.
‘When the EU asked Israel why or whether they filter human remains out of the rubble, no answer ever came,’ he added.
Clearing the debris before families can search it with heavy equipment leaves Palestinians unable to establish whether missing relatives are dead or have been seized by Israeli forces and held in its network of torture centres.
An Israeli company, Terra Firma, has been clearing rubble with machinery built to crush debris into dust, some of it used by the Israeli military to build roads near Erez.
The board ‘is actively paying, compensating, subsidising, and aiding Israeli companies, contractors, the Israeli military, and the Israeli cabinet for these rubble-removal and road-paving operations’, the Gaza Herald wrote. ‘These operations systematically erase evidence of war crimes and desecrate human remains,’ it added.
No measures are taken to separate the remains of victims from the debris, or to preserve mass graves now buried under newly laid roads.
Water networks, electricity systems, sewage plants, hospitals and bakeries are left deliberately unrepaired.
The Palestinian human rights advocate Dr Ramy Abdu said the board ‘acts as a structural cover for ongoing land seizures and displacement’.
Set up after the October 2025 ceasefire, the Board was presented by Trump as the body that would oversee reconstruction for the benefit of Palestinians.
Over the past ten months, an investigation by the New Humanitarian found, ‘Israeli forces have stepped up a systematic campaign of erasure in the area of Gaza directly under their control’, tearing down whatever is left, ‘setting fire to fields, and bulldozing towns and once-green agricultural communities into the ground’.
The pattern of work points to the creation of a blank slate and the infrastructure required for long-term occupation.
