A senior US official visited Saudi Arabia in April to shore up the kingdom’s $1bn pledge for President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” in Gaza, amid concerns that funding is not materialising, one Arab official and a US official familiar with the matter told Middle East Eye.
Aryeh Lightstone, one of the key US officials overseeing the US’s post-war planning for Gaza, visited the kingdom, where he met with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan to discuss the financial pledge Saudi Arabia made to the Board of Peace in February.
The board includes a committee of Palestinian technocrats approved by Israel to manage daily affairs in Gaza. But MEE understands that Saudi Arabia has been pushing for greater overall Palestinian representation on the board.
The Board of Peace is US-led and comprises over 25 member states, but western and Arab officials tell MEE that its funding hinges on the Gulf. Trump committed $10bn in US taxpayer funds for the group.
The US push for Saudi Arabia to distribute funds comes as the kingdom is also focused on trying to unlock about $5bn in frozen tax revenue for the Palestinian Authority (PA), which Israel is withholding, the Arab official and an official in the region told MEE.
CLICK FOLLOW: TO FOLLOW US
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other eSPORTY
Saudi Arabia wants Israel to release the funds as opposed to using their own funds as a financial lifeline to the embattled PA without serious reforms, the official in the region told MEE.
It’s unclear whether Riyadh sees the files as linked.
Funding gap
Lightstone, an American Rabbi and close ally of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is one of a handful of political appointees that the Trump administration has tapped to draft a post-war plan for Gaza alongside Israeli tech moguls and members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
As of late last year, Lightstone and other US advisors were living out of two luxury beachfront hotels in Tel Aviv – the Kempinski and the Hilton – as they drafted plans for Gaza.
In an interview with The New York Times in November, Lightstone confirmed that one such plan was to build housing for thousands of “screened” Palestinians to live behind the so-called yellow line in Gaza, which is occupied by Israeli troops.
The US advisors have also drafted plans to turn Gaza into an AI tech hub and megacity, which critics have denounced as a bid to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
Israel launched a ferocious offensive on Gaza following the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel, which killed over 72,500 Palestinians, mainly women and children. The United Nations, dozens of human rights experts and world leaders have called Israel’s war a genocide.
The US-Israel war on Iran has taken the spotlight off Gaza, where Israel has continued to launch attacks that have killed over 850 Palestinians despite a ceasefire that the US brokered in October 2025. Ceasefire violations occur nearly every day.
From Nakba to genocide: A Gaza grandmother’s lifetime of loss and resilience
Read More »
Israel has continued to restrict the supply of aid, let alone rebuilding material, into the enclave, where 90 percent of civilian infrastructure has been destroyed.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE pledged more than $4bn dollars in early February to support the board that Trump established following the ceasefire in Gaza.
Some funding from the UAE, which is Israel’s closest Arab partner, has begun to flow to the board, including $100m for a Palestinian police force backed by the US and Israel.
But Saudi Arabia and other Arab states have been hesitant about their funding.
Reuters reported on Monday that the entity faces a major gap between funding pledges and disbursements. The Board of Peace said that it pledged $17bn in February.
Citing a 15 May report to the United Nations Security Council, Reuters reported the board said that “the gap between commitment (to the Board of Peace) and disbursement must be closed with urgency”.
Trump sits at the head of the so-called Board of Peace, but the executive managing it is Nickolay Mladenov, a former UN envoy who was teaching at the UAE’s Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy before he was tapped for the role.
