BUILT, THEN BURIED
How fifty-seven nations built a peace framework and one state’s plan replaced it
Before the Board of Peace was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, before Resolution 2803 was adopted by the Security Council, before the Yellow Line was drawn across fifty-three per cent of Gaza — there was another framework.
It was not proposed by a single head of state.
It was not authored in a Tel Aviv hotel suite.
It was not presented as a slideshow labelled “sensitive” at an investor summit.
It was built over two years, across two extraordinary summits, by fifty-seven nations, led by the largest economy in the Arab world.
It offered what international law has required since 1967: Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 borders in exchange for full normalization and collective security guarantees — including for Israel.
It was endorsed by one hundred and forty-two states at the General Assembly.
It was formally adopted at the highest level of Arab and Islamic diplomacy.
It was co-chaired by a European power.
It explicitly condemned the October 7 attacks.
It included the disarmament of Hamas.
It offered Israel what no previous Arab framework had offered at this scale — recognition, normalization, and security, from every Arab and Muslim-majority state, simultaneously, in writing.
It was not rejected.
It was not voted down.
It was not found inadequate.
It was bypassed.
This article reconstructs how that happened: how a two-year, fifty-seven-nation framework that met every stated precondition for peace was procedurally displaced by a unilateral plan that never had to compete with it.
I. The First Summit
On 11 November 2023 — five weeks after the October 7 attacks — the Extraordinary Joint Arab and Islamic Summit convened in Riyadh. It was the first time the Council of the League of Arab States and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation merged their extraordinary summits into a single body.
Twenty-two Arab League member states.
Fifty-seven OIC member states.
The combined unique membership: fifty-seven nations spanning North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
The summit was hosted by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
It was chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
What emerged from that summit was not a communique.
It was not a statement of concern.
It was not a call for restraint.
It was an institutional act.
The summit formed the Joint Arab-Islamic Ministerial Committee, headed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with a standing mandate to pursue a comprehensive resolution to the question of Palestine.
A permanent body.
A named chair.
A continuing mandate that would carry forward across every subsequent meeting, summit, and diplomatic engagement for the next two years.
This is the same committee that would later help co-author the New York Declaration at the United Nations.
The formation of this committee is the structural event. Statements expire with the news cycle. Institutional bodies persist: they hold meetings, issue reports, and carry mandates from one summit to the next. They create continuity where communiques create moments.
Saudi Arabia did not volunteer for this role. Saudi Arabia was elected to it — by fifty-seven nations, at the highest level of collective Arab and Islamic authority, during the most acute crisis in the region since 1973.
The mandate was not to mediate. It was to lead.
And it did.
II. The Framework Takes Shape
For the next ten months, the Joint Ministerial Committee worked. It held meetings. It engaged capitals. It built the diplomatic architecture that would carry the framework from a summit resolution to an operational proposal with international backing.
On 27 September 2024, at the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the framework became visible.
Saudi Arabia, alongside the Kingdom of Norway and the European Union, launched the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.
Not a discussion group. Not a forum for dialogue. An alliance — with a named objective, named co-chairs, and a mandate to move from principle to implementation.
On the same day, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi stood before the international press and presented the unified position. Safadi spoke directly. The Arab and Islamic states were prepared to guarantee Israel’s security as part of a comprehensive peace agreement. Full normalization. Mutual recognition. Collective security guarantees from fifty-seven nations — in exchange for what the international legal order has demanded since Resolution 242 in 1967.
This was not an abstraction. This was a foreign minister, representing a standing committee of fifty-seven nations, offering Israel the single thing Israel has claimed to need above all else — security — and offering it from the entire Arab and Muslim-majority world simultaneously.
Not bilaterally, as Egypt had in 1979. Not conditionally, as the Arab Peace Initiative had in 2002. Simultaneously, collectively, and on the record, at the United Nations, to the international press, with the institutional weight of two extraordinary summits behind it
In October 2024, the Global Alliance held its first operational meeting in Riyadh.
The co-chairs — Saudi Arabia, Norway, and the European Union — convened member states to begin translating the framework from diplomatic language into actionable structure.
On 11 November 2024, the Second Extraordinary Joint Arab and Islamic Summit convened in Riyadh. Again hosted by King Salman. Again chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. One year to the day after the first summit. Fifty-seven nations represented.
The resolution adopted at that summit contains the structural anchor of the entire framework.
Paragraph 24 states that “a just and comprehensive peace in the region that guarantees security and stability for all its states cannot be achieved without ending the Israeli occupation of all occupied Arab territories up to the June 4, 1967 line, in accordance with the relevant United Nations resolutions and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative in all its components.”
Read three phrases in that sentence.
“All its states.” The security guarantee covers Israel. Explicitly.
The fifty-seven nations that adopted this resolution committed, in writing, at the highest level of collective authority, to a peace framework that guarantees Israel’s security. The claim that the Arab and Islamic world refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to security is contradicted by the text of a resolution adopted by the body that represents it.
“The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative in all its components.” The framework is not new. It traces its lineage to the Beirut summit of 2002 — twenty-four years of diplomatic continuity. What the November 2024 resolution did was not invent a position. It reaffirmed a standing offer and attached institutional machinery to it.
“Cannot be achieved without ending the Israeli occupation.” The offer is conditional. The condition is what international law requires. Withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders is not a negotiating position.
It is the legal baseline established by the International Court of Justice, reaffirmed by the General Assembly annually for fifty-eight years, and found binding in the July 2024 advisory opinion by a vote of eleven to four. The condition attached to the security guarantee is compliance with the law as the Court has found it.
Paragraph 25 formally welcomed the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. Paragraph 34 mandated the Joint Arab-Islamic Ministerial Committee, headed by Saudi Arabia, to continue and intensify its work.
By November 2024, the framework had a standing institutional body with a named chair, an international alliance with European co-chairs, a formal resolution adopted by fifty-seven nations at two consecutive extraordinary summits, and a specific offer on the table: security for withdrawal, normalization for compliance, peace for law.
The framework was not theoretical. It was operational. It had meetings, mandates, co-chairs, and a chain of diplomatic continuity that ran from November 2023 through November 2024 without interruption.
It would continue into 2025. It would be endorsed by the General Assembly. It would be co-chaired by France at the highest international level.
And then it would disappear from the record — not because it was defeated, but because the record moved on without it.
III. The Framework Enters the International Record
In March 2025, an Extraordinary Arab Summit convened in Cairo, building on the Riyadh resolutions. The mandate continued. The institutional machinery kept turning.
In June 2025, the 51st Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation met in Istanbul. The November 2024 resolutions were reaffirmed. The Joint Ministerial Committee, headed by Saudi Arabia, reported on its continuing work. The chain was unbroken — Riyadh, Riyadh, Cairo, Istanbul — four meetings across nineteen months, each building on the last, each carrying the mandate forward.
On 29 and 30 July 2025, the framework reached its highest international expression.
The High-Level International Conference on the Question of Palestine and the Two-State Solution convened in New York. It was co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. The conference produced a seven-page document — the New York Declaration — signed by seventeen co-chair states plus the European Union and the League of Arab States.
The New York Declaration was adopted by the co-chairs on 29–30 July 2025 and then endorsed by the General Assembly on 12 September 2025 by a vote of 142 in favor, 10 against, and 12 abstentions.
The co-chairs included Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Norway, Qatar, Senegal, Spain, Türkiye, and the United Kingdom.
Read that list. It is not a regional coalition. It is not a bloc.
It includes the largest economies in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes NATO members, BRICS members, G7 members, and non-aligned states. It includes states that have historically supported Israel and states that have historically supported Palestine. It includes a permanent member of the Security Council.
The New York Declaration commits to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The release of all hostages.
The establishment of a viable, sovereign, independent Palestinian state.
The disarmament of Hamas.
The exclusion of Hamas from governance.
Normalization between Israel and Arab states.
And collective security guarantees — including for Israel.
It explicitly condemns the attacks of 7 October 2023.
That sentence requires emphasis, because it has been systematically obscured in the coverage of everything that followed. The New York Declaration — co-authored by Saudi Arabia, endorsed by the Arab League, signed by seventeen states including Muslim-majority nations — explicitly condemns the Hamas attacks of October 7.
The claim that the Arab and Islamic world has refused to condemn October 7 is contradicted by the text of the document the Arab and Islamic world co-authored at the highest level of international diplomacy.
The declaration describes itself as “a concrete time-bound action plan.” It calls for steps that are “tangible, time bound, and irreversible.”
It does not specify a total duration. What it specifies is a direction: from ceasefire to statehood, through defined institutional steps, with international oversight and collective security guarantees, within a framework that treats Israeli security and Palestinian sovereignty as structurally inseparable — because they are.
On 12 September 2025, the General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration.
The vote was 142 in favor. Ten against. Twelve abstentions.
The ten states that voted against: Argentina, Hungary, Israel, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tonga, and the United States.
The same states. The same ten. On every resolution, in every vote, at every level of the international system — the same small group, voting against the same legal principles, holding the same position, while one hundred and forty-two states vote the other way.
By September 2025, the Saudi-led framework had achieved everything a diplomatic initiative can achieve within the international system.
It had institutional continuity across two years.
It had a standing committee with a named chair.
It had an international alliance co-chaired by a European power.
It had a formal declaration signed by seventeen states and two multilateral organizations.
It had the explicit endorsement of the General Assembly by a margin of one hundred and forty-two to ten.
It had condemned the very attack it was accused of ignoring.
It had offered Israel the security it claimed to need, from the states it claimed would never offer it.
There was nothing left to build. The framework was complete.
What happened next was not a response to the framework’s inadequacy. It was a replacement of the framework by an architecture that did not acknowledge its existence.
IV. The Displacement
Seventeen days after the General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration, the United States announced its own plan.
On 29 September 2025, the Trump administration published a twenty-point plan for Gaza. It had not been developed through the Global Alliance.
It had not been coordinated with the Joint Ministerial Committee.
It had not been presented at any multilateral forum.
It had been authored by a small team of political appointees — led by Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff — working from two luxury hotels in Tel Aviv.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted it immediately.
Hamas stated it had not received a written copy.
On 10 October 2025, the plan came into effect. Israeli forces withdrew to a demarcation line inside Gaza — the Yellow Line, placing approximately fifty-three per cent of the territory under Israeli military control.
On 17 November 2025, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2803, endorsing the Trump Plan as the governance framework for Gaza.
It established the Board of Peace as the transitional authority.
It placed the Board under the chairmanship of the President of the United States.
It authorized the deployment of an International Stabilization Force.
It placed Palestinian governance under the “oversight and supervision” of the Board. It described statehood as an aspiration conditional on performance assessed by the body that governs the territory.
Resolution 2803 does not reference the New York Declaration.
It does not reference the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.
It does not reference the Joint Arab-Islamic Ministerial Committee.
It does not reference the November 2023 summit.
It does not reference the November 2024 summit.
It does not reference the Cairo summit.
It does not reference the Istanbul council.
It does not reference the Safadi press conference.
It does not reference the two years of diplomatic work by fifty-seven nations.
It does not reference them because it did not need to.
The Security Council is not required to acknowledge frameworks it did not adopt.
The General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration by a vote of one hundred and forty-two to ten. The Security Council endorsed the Trump Plan by its own resolution. Both are on the procedural record. Only one has enforcement power.
The displacement was not a debate. It was not an argument. It was not a vote in which the Saudi-led framework lost and the Trump Plan won. There was no contest.
The framework built by fifty-seven nations over two years was not rejected by the body that mattered. It was ignored by the body that mattered.
The Security Council adopted an entirely separate architecture — authored by the state that holds the veto, endorsed by the state that holds the veto — and the framework that one hundred and forty-two states had endorsed seventeen days earlier ceased to exist as an operational factor in the governance of Gaza.
The New York Declaration is still on the record. The Global Alliance still exists. The Joint Ministerial Committee still has its mandate. Nothing was revoked. Nothing was repealed. Nothing was withdrawn.
It was simply made irrelevant — by the structural fact that the General Assembly can endorse and the Security Council can govern, and when the two point in different directions, governance wins. Not because it is right. Because it has the mechanism.
The framework built by fifty-seven nations did not fail. It was never given a forum in which failure was possible. It was given a vote it won and denied a mechanism it needed. And the mechanism was held by the state whose plan replaced it.
V. The Reservation
On 22 January 2026, the Board of Peace was formally launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Nineteen countries attended the signing ceremony. The charter was signed. The architecture was operational.
On 19 February 2026, the Board of Peace held its inaugural operational meeting in Washington, DC. Approximately forty countries were represented. The International Stabilization Force announced its first five troop-contributing states: Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania. Turkey committed separately.
The target force strength: twenty thousand troops across five sectors.
Nine countries pledged approximately seven billion dollars collectively. The United States pledged an additional ten billion. Total initial funding: approximately seventeen billion dollars.
Among the pledges: Saudi Arabia — one billion dollars.
The United Arab Emirates — one point two billion dollars.
Both declined to contribute troops.
Read that twice. The two most capable military powers in the Gulf — the states that hosted the summits, chaired the committee, co-authored the framework, led the alliance, and presented the offer to the world — wrote cheques and withheld soldiers.
This is not refusal. Refusal would be absence. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were present. They participated. They contributed financially. They did everything except provide the one thing that would make them operationally responsible for the outcome — the troops that would stand on the ground inside Gaza, enforcing an architecture they did not author, inside a perimeter they did not draw, under the command of a force answering to a Board they do not chair.
The structural logic is precise. A state that contributes money without troops is investing in the humanitarian outcome while declining ownership of the governance architecture. It is saying: we will pay for what the population needs, but we will not put our soldiers inside a framework we did not build and do not control.
That is not obstruction. It is a reservation — a formal withholding of operational commitment that leaves every other form of engagement intact.
The same logic applies to Israel, from the opposite direction.
On 24 February 2026, Israeli Security Cabinet Minister Zeev Elkin announced that Israel would provide no funding to the Board of Peace. “We were attacked,” he stated. The state whose security the fifty-seven-nation framework had offered to guarantee — the state for whom the entire architecture of normalization and collective security had been constructed — declined to fund the reconstruction of the territory its military had destroyed.
Saudi Arabia built the framework and was bypassed. It now funds the replacement but will not enforce it. Israel received the framework’s offer and ignored it.
It now declines to fund the architecture its closest ally authored in its name.
The framework sits on the record between them — unclaimed by the state it was built to protect, unenforced by the states that built it.
Three days after the Washington meeting, on 22 February 2026, Benjamin Netanyahu announced the Hexagon of Alliances.
The proposed members: Israel, India, Greece, Cyprus, and unnamed Arab, African, and Asian states. The stated purpose: to counter “the radical Shia axis” and “the emerging radical Sunni axis.” The framing: a regional alliance of like-minded states, structured around shared security interests.
The analysts were immediate.
Andreas Krieg, King’s College London: a “branding exercise for a patchwork of existing relationships.” He added: “The Saudi normalization track has become far more politically costly for Riyadh, and Israel is trying to show it has alternatives.”
Ori Goldberg, independent Israeli analyst: “Nobody wants to touch Israel with a ten-foot pole. Israel is bad news.”
Two of the three named members — Greece and Cyprus — are parties to the Rome Statute and legally obligated to arrest Netanyahu under the ICC warrants if he entered their territory. The Prime Minister of Israel proposed a regional alliance with countries that are required by law to detain him.
India — the fourth named member — responded through Prime Minister Modi on social media. He affirmed the bilateral relationship. He did not endorse the alliance. He did not agree to join a bloc. India’s foreign policy doctrine — strategic autonomy, multi-alignment, simultaneous engagement with all major powers — is structurally incompatible with membership in an Israeli-framed anti-axis coalition.
Modi visited Israel. He also sent his foreign secretary to Moscow. He also sent his trade team to Washington. He also deepened cooperation with Saudi Arabia.
India does not join blocs. That is its foundational foreign policy position, and the Hexagon announcement did not change it.
The Hexagon is not a new alliance in formation. It is the narrative of an alliance, constructed for domestic and international perception, in the specific moment when the alternative that mattered — the Saudi-led framework that would have delivered normalization on terms that required Israeli withdrawal — was no longer available on Israeli terms.
The framework that offered Israel security from fifty-seven nations was bypassed.
The hedge that replaces it is a geometric branding exercise whose named members cannot legally host its architect.
VI. What Was Offered
The question this record raises is not whether the Saudi-led framework would have succeeded.
No one can answer that. The framework was never implemented. Its mechanisms were never tested. Its security guarantees were never activated. Its pathway from ceasefire to statehood was never walked.
Whether fifty-seven nations could have delivered what they collectively promised is a question that belongs to a history that did not happen — and cannot be answered by the history that did.
The question the record raises is different. It is prior. It is structural.
A framework existed. It was built by fifty-seven nations over two years. It was led by the largest economy in the Arab world. It was co-chaired by a European power and endorsed by one hundred and forty-two states at the General Assembly. It offered Israeli withdrawal in exchange for normalization and collective security. It condemned the October 7 attacks. It included the disarmament of Hamas. It met every stated precondition that Israel and the United States had publicly demanded for decades.
It was not tested.
It was replaced — by an architecture authored by a single state, endorsed by a single Security Council resolution, chaired by a single head of state, operating inside a perimeter drawn by the military of the state whose compliance the framework had been designed to secure.
The fifty-seven nations that built the framework now watch the territory it was designed to address be governed by an architecture they did not write.
The troops they declined to provide are being supplied by five small-to-medium states. The money they contributed funds a reconstruction plan they did not author. The state whose security they offered to guarantee has declined to fund any of it.
The framework is still on the record. The New York Declaration has not been withdrawn. The Global Alliance has not been dissolved. The Joint Ministerial Committee has not been disbanded. The resolutions of November 2023 and November 2024 have not been revoked.
They have simply been overtaken — by a mechanism that did not need to defeat them, only to exist in the one body where their endorsement could not follow.
One hundred and forty-two states said yes.
The body that matters said something else.
And the framework that fifty-seven nations spent two years building — the one that offered security, normalization, and peace, on terms the law requires and the Court has affirmed — sits on the procedural record, intact, unimplemented, waiting for a mechanism that was never made available to it.
What was offered was not insufficient. What was offered was not given a chance.
That is what the record shows. That is all the record shows. And it is enough.
Stand where truth holds.
— Meridian Vox