Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at the first Board of Peace meeting on Gaza, possible U.S. strikes on Iran, and a life sentence for former South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.
Peacemaker Ambitions
U.S. President Donald Trump hosted the inaugural Board of Peace meeting in Washington on Thursday. The group, a key part of the United States’ 20-point peace plan to end the Israel-Hamas war, aims to tackle reconstruction, disarmament, and governance in Gaza. However, Trump’s vision for the body has quickly expanded into a more ambitious mandate: bringing lasting peace to not just the Middle East but the whole world.
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at the first Board of Peace meeting on Gaza, possible U.S. strikes on Iran, and a life sentence for former South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.
Peacemaker Ambitions
U.S. President Donald Trump hosted the inaugural Board of Peace meeting in Washington on Thursday. The group, a key part of the United States’ 20-point peace plan to end the Israel-Hamas war, aims to tackle reconstruction, disarmament, and governance in Gaza. However, Trump’s vision for the body has quickly expanded into a more ambitious mandate: bringing lasting peace to not just the Middle East but the whole world.
During its first day in action, nine members of the Board of Peace agreed to pledge a total of $7 billion toward relief for Gaza. That comes on top of $10 billion pledged by the United States, though Trump has not specified what that money will be used for or where it will come from.
“Every dollar spent is an investment in stability and the hope of new and harmonious [region],” Trump said. “The Board of Peace is showing how a better future can be built right here in this room.” However, these commitments represent only a small fraction of the estimated $70 billion needed to rebuild the war-torn territory.
At the same time, five countries agreed on Thursday to deploy troops to Gaza as part of an international stabilization force, with two others (Jordan and Egypt) committing to train police. The stabilization plan, which calls for 20,000 soldiers and 12,000 police officers, will initially deploy troops to Rafah to focus on reconstruction efforts. According to contracting records reviewed by the Guardian, the Trump administration plans to build a 5,000-person military base to serve as the force’s operating site.
Although Thursday’s agenda for the Board of Peace centered on restoring stability to Gaza, Trump repeatedly invoked the body’s future role as an instrument of global conflict resolution—making some experts worry that the White House seeks to use the board to rival the United Nations at a time when Trump’s own stance toward the multilateral institution is sour. Sure enough, the U.N. Security Council was forced to reschedule a high-level meeting to discuss the Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal from Thursday to Wednesday to accommodate those wishing to attend both sessions.
“Someday, I won’t be here. The United Nations will be,” Trump said. “I think it is going to be much stronger, and the Board of Peace is going to almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.”
Despite Trump’s comments, the U.S. president has all but ensured his extensive control over the group—even after he has left office. Trump appointed himself as the body’s lifelong chair and gave himself unilateral authority to veto decisions, approve the agenda, and select his own successor. “What’s unmistakably clear is whose board it is and how Trump is going to control it,” Aaron David Miller writes in Foreign Policy.
Such control has sparked resistance from many of the United States’ traditional allies. Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom are just some of the countries that have rejected Trump’s invitation to join the group, though his decision to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin (who has yet to accept) also spurred their rejections.
“One concern is that at the international level, it should above all be the U.N. that manages these crisis situations,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, said on Tuesday. Vatican City has also rejected Trump’s invitation.
Trump, though, does not appear concerned. Addressing the gathered officials from nearly 50 countries who chose to attend the Thursday meeting as either members or observers, he said that the countries that have not yet accepted the invitation to join the board will ultimately do so. “Some are playing a little cute—it doesn’t work,” he said. “You can’t play cute with me.”
Today’s Most Read
What We’re Following
Looming conflict with Iran. Iranian forces held annual military drills with Russian troops in the Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean on Thursday, just days after temporarily closing the strategic Strait of Hormuz for live-fire drills. While the simple act of holding such exercises is often cause for concern for Iran’s Western adversaries, the timing of these operations make experts particularly worried, as they come amid a massive U.S. military buildup in the region.
Top U.S. national security officials told CBS News on Wednesday that the United States is ready to launch potential strikes on Iran as early as this weekend. Although Trump has yet to give the operation a green light, CNN reported that the White House convened in the Situation Room on Wednesday to discuss the crisis.
U.S. negotiators held indirect talks with Iranian officials in Geneva on Tuesday to try and reach a nuclear deal. According to Iran’s foreign minister, the two sides came out of the meetings with a “general understanding on a set of guiding principles,” but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday that Washington and Tehran remained apart on some issues. Speaking at the Board of Peace meeting on Thursday, Trump warned Iran that it “must make a deal” or else “bad things will happen.”
“We may have to take it a step further, or we may not. Maybe we’re going to make a deal. You are going to be finding out over the next, probably, 10 days,” Trump said.
The last time that the U.S. military targeted Iran was in June 2025, when U.S. forces struck three Iranian nuclear sites. If confrontation were to occur again, Arash Reisinezhad and Arsham Reisinezhad write in Foreign Policy, it will likely be “a limited, carefully calibrated strike designed to reshape bargaining dynamics rather than end them.”
Life in prison. Former South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was found guilty on Thursday of leading an insurrection when he imposed a short-lived martial law order in December 2024. The South Korean court cited evidence of Yoon mobilizing military and police forces to illegally seize the country’s National Assembly, arrest political opponents, and expand his executive power. Yoon was sentenced to life in prison for his actions.
The ruling ends the country’s biggest political crisis in decades, during which Yoon defied an arrest warrant, was impeached and formally removed from office, and faced several criminal charges. Yoon has maintained his innocence throughout the proceedings, and on Thursday, his legal team accused the court of issuing a “predetermined verdict.”
Although many praised Yoon’s sentencing, some argued that the punishment was not enough. Prosecutors had initially sought the death penalty for Yoon, as the same insurrection charge was used to sentence former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan to death in 1996.
“Hallmarks of genocide.” Atrocities committed by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) during its siege on the city of El Fasher last October bore the “hallmarks of genocide,” according to an independent U.N. report published on Thursday. This is the first time that a U.N.-mandated body has accused the militant group of acts of genocide since the Sudanese civil war erupted in April 2023.
El Fasher was long considered to be the last remaining stronghold of the Sudanese armed forces in the Darfur region, leading the RSF to carry out an 18-month siege on the city, imposing conditions that the report said “amounted to a systematic destruction of the means of survival of [the city’s] non-Arab communities.” During the operation’s final three days in late October 2025, when the RSF ultimately captured El Fasher, the U.N. mission documented a series of rights violations by the militant group, including mass killings, torture, widespread rape and sexual violence, arbitrary detention, and enforced disappearances.
“The scale, coordination, and public endorsement of the operation by senior RSF leadership demonstrate that the crimes committed in and around el-Fasher were not random excesses of war,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the fact-finding mission on Sudan. “They formed part of a planned and organized operation that bears the defining characteristics of genocide.”
The RSF has previously denied such abuses, instead making counteraccusations against Sudan’s military. But although the Sudanese armed forces have also been accused—including by the Biden administration—of committing war crimes, the international community does not appear to be swayed by the RSF’s defense. In response to Thursday’s report, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on three RSF commanders for their actions in El Fasher, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called on the RSF to commit to an immediate humanitarian cease-fire.
Odds and Ends
Britain’s Labour Party is in political upheaval over the fallout of the Epstein files. But not everyone at Downing Street is on thin ice. Approval ratings for Larry the cat, the British government’s unofficial first feline, remain high—just in time for the tabby to celebrate his 15th year in the position on Sunday. Larry was adopted by then-Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011 and has remained at Downing Street ever since. As chief mouser to the cabinet office, Larry’s official duties include “greeting guests to the house, inspecting security defenses and testing antique furniture for napping quality.” The cat of FP’s World Brief writer is taking notes.
