The envoy heading US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace, Nickolay Mladenov, has warned that the Gaza ceasefire is at risk of collapse, blaming what he called the failure of both sides to adhere to the roadmap, in a framing that presents Israel and the Palestinians as equally responsible while the facts on the ground show otherwise.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Mladenov said the failure of both sides to abide by the roadmap threatened a collapse of the ceasefire, and that a return to war would be devastating, insisting there was no better alternative to the current plan. He stressed that his warning was directed at both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, and cautioned that any retreat from the roadmap's commitments could return the region to a spiral of violence.
The even-handed language collapses on contact with the record. Since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025, Israel has killed 1,303 Palestinians and wounded 4,336 more, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, in violations that have continued without interruption from the first day of the truce. Israel has bombed homes, tents, cafes, and water facilities, assassinated officials, blocked aid, and threatened mass displacement, all while its forces never once halted their fire. There is no comparable record on the Palestinian side, and Mladenov's own account concedes the point, noting that the Strip is witnessing continued Israeli raids and attacks even as he distributes blame equally.
The imbalance runs deeper than the casualty figures. It was Netanyahu who publicly rejected the very roadmap Mladenov is defending, denying reports that Israel had agreed to allow international troops into Gaza at all, while Hamas said it had approved the plan and called for Israel to be held to its implementation. The party refusing the roadmap is Israel; the party that accepted it is the one Mladenov places on equal footing with it. By assigning shared responsibility, the envoy obscures which side is actually blocking the path he claims to be protecting.
Mladenov's posture reflects the built-in bias of the Board of Peace itself, a body chaired by Trump and staffed with figures like Jared Kushner and Tony Blair, whose mediation has consistently accommodated Israeli demands. It was Mladenov who sat alongside Kushner in the meetings where Israel secured guarantees that its army would keep operating and assassinating in Gaza and that no reconstruction would proceed until Hamas disarmed. His warning about collapse, and his careful spreading of blame, function less as neutral arbitration than as cover for an Israeli side that has never stopped killing, recast as one of two equally errant parties.
The consequences of that false balance fall on Palestinians. By treating the aggressor and the besieged as equally at fault, the Board of Peace relieves Israel of the pressure that might actually restrain it, and shifts the burden onto Hamas to make further concessions to preserve a ceasefire that Israel alone has been violating. Mladenov frets over a collapse while declining to name the party causing it, and in doing so lends the authority of an international mediator to the fiction that the killing in Gaza is a shared failure rather than a one-sided assault.
