Who’s the Sole Palestinian Woman in the US-Led Board of Peace?

Arshi Qureshi

In Gaza, Hana al-Tarazi has spent years as a lawyer working on cases that turn on the details of both civil law and Islamic jurisprudence in courtrooms where women still fight to be heard. These include personal-status disputes that can decide the future of a family; and who keeps the children, who inherits the home or whether a mother can secure financial support after separating from her spouse.

Al-Tarazi’s career is now being pulled into a much larger arena as she has been named the social affairs commissioner on the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, or NCAG, a new technocratic body established at the lowest tier of the United States-led Board of Peace. The board is reportedly meeting for the first time on Feb. 19 in Washington.

Ali Shaath, a civil engineer who was born in Gaza and has worked for the Palestinian Authority, heads the 15-member NCAG, whose participants are all originally from Gaza. Most of them are affiliated with or close to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The new committee is tasked with administering Gaza under international supervision, focusing on security and infrastructure in the next phase of the US-led 20-point peace plan. The first phase began on Oct. 11 with a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel — regularly violated by the latter — and the return of all hostages, dead or alive as well as releasing Palestinian prisoners.

The committee was announced by the White House in January 2026, under the Board of Peace chaired by President Trump. While the upper executive boards will control strategy, funding and other matters, NCAG is supposed to manage Gaza’s daily civilian life. Approximately two million people reside in the Strip, while 72,000 Gazans have been killed in the two-year-old war.

Al-Tarazi is the only woman on the committee and the only Palestinian Christian assigned to a portfolio that carries the war’s consequences: dealing with poverty and cash assistance, family reunification, disability services, shelters, support for widows and orphans and the growing trauma of a population trying to survive after several mass displacements amid relentless bombing and killing that continue today.

PassBlue was unable to contact al-Tarazi, although a Gazan who knows her family in the Palestinian territories said that al-Tarazi and other NCAG members were under strict orders by Ali Shaath not to talk to the media. Another expert familiar with the committee suggested that al-Tarazi being Christian will have no bearing on her role in NCAG.

Its structure places Palestinians mostly in administrative roles, while decision-making power will be concentrated at the top of the Board of Peace, chaired by Trump with sole veto power for a lifetime. The board includes top American officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and high-profile international figures, such as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Nickolay Mladenov, a former United Nations envoy to the Mideast and a Bulgarian, is the high representative, overseeing the logistics of the transition of Gaza to peacetime.

A separate international stabilization force is expected to enforce security arrangements alongside civilian bodies, but no country has officially signed up for the force yet. It remains unclear who will disarm Hamas, which is part of the peace plan, and to what extent.

Al-Tarazi’s legal work for women

The UN so far has no role in the Board of Peace, yet it was endorsed by the UN Security Council in November, authorizing an entity whose full details had not been divulged or fleshed out. (China and Russia abstained in the vote.) Since the board has been officially unveiled by Trump, some Council members are aghast at the entity’s publicly stated structure and ambitions, as stated in its charter. That includes Trump having full veto rights and his claiming that the board could put the Council out of business.

Bahrain and Pakistan, elected members of the Council, are among the board’s members, but it is uncertain how the board will interact with the Council and its accountability to the UN body. The Council plans to meet on Feb. 19 on the Mideast and Gaza, when more clarity could emerge.

Long before she was pulled into Gaza’s new postwar-governing experiment, al-Tarazi broke barriers through law. She studied law at Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, becoming one of the first Christian women to enroll in the program. Her coursework included Islamic sharia, a foundation that later shaped her career. As the first Christian woman in Gaza — from a prominent family there — to argue cases in sharia courts, many women sought her out because they trusted her to handle disputes that mixed law, religion and vulnerability.

“The Palestinian law is a just law,” she said in an interview with the publication Dunia al-Watan, on Feb. 24, 2019, emphasizing that citizenship, not religion, was the basis of legal equality. Her work expanded as Gaza’s conditions deteriorated. She handled cases shaped by poverty, displacement and fractured families, often representing women navigating systems not built to protect them.

In profiles published by Bethlehem Bible College, in Palestine, where she later completed a master’s degree in leadership and Christian ministry through remote study, al-Tarazi described struggling through unreliable electricity, collapsing infrastructure and isolation, long before the simmering conflict between Israel and Hamas intensified in October 2023, after the Palestinian militia carried out its massacre in southern Israel.

During the war, al-Tarazi was displaced from her home and sought shelter inside her church in Gaza. The enclave’s legal system ground to a halt as neighborhoods were flattened and families scattered or fled amid the Israeli bombardments. Yet, al-Tarazi continued to work.

“The Palestinian woman is the heart of resilience,” she said in a message released around International Women’s Day, 2025, calling women “the voice of the voiceless” in a society that repeatedly demands their sacrifice.

That belief may now collide with politics. The NCAG is being promoted as a neutral, professional body, but critics argue that the structure amounts to a form of trusteeship, with foreign powers — led by Trump — setting policy while Palestinians administer civic services. Early NCAG meetings have been held in Cairo, and Israel has yet to allow committee members to enter the Strip, raising doubts about whether the body can genuinely govern or is meant to manage the crisis from afar, if at all.

Online claims point to posts by Fatah-affiliated professional networks for lawyers in Gaza and to circulated photos said to show al-Tarazi at a Fatah event as evidence of partisan proximity. Her supporters dismiss the claims, calling them guilt-by-association in a society where public life and politics are deeply intertwined.

“Gaza is not just a place of suffering,” al-Tarazi has said, acknowledging a possible future for its civilians, especially for women.