FIFA have announced a formal partnership with President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace and announced a three-stage plan to support the regeneration of Gaza, which it claimed will include the construction of a 20,000-seater stadium within three years of work commencing.
A statement by FIFA said that implementation would proceed in accordance with ongoing monitoring of safety and security conditions.
The FIFA president Gianni Infantino flew into the United States on a Qatari private jet earlier this week. He first attended a conference at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., convened by World Liberty Financial, which is co-founded by the U.S. president and his three sons Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron.
Infantino then headed to Thursday’s Board of Peace meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace building in Washington, D.C., where Trump oversaw his first official meeting of the group, which was first announced during the fall. Attendees were gifted a red Trump baseball cap which had the numbers 45-47 inscribed, indicating his two presidencies, and Infantino was captured wearing the cap and grinning while doing so.
Trump has styled himself as a bastion of peace, claiming to have ended eight wars, and he was supported in this mission by Infantino, who in December awarded Trump the inaugural FIFA peace prize during the draw for this summer’s World Cup.
The Board of Peace, founded and led by Trump, has so far been shunned by America’s allies in NATO, but nations including Hungary, Israel, Belarus, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Argentina and Turkey have joined.
On Thursday, nine governments including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, committed towards a collective $7 billion contribution to facilitate the reconstruction of Gaza, while Trump claimed the U.S. would commit $10 billion, although he did not specify from where this money would be allocated.
President Donald Trump and FIFA chief Gianni Infantino have built an increasingly close relationship. (Jia Haocheng / Getty Images)
The meeting spoke optimistically of Gaza’s future but despite the ceasefire orchestrated by the Trump administration in the fall, Hamas is yet to disarm and Israel still occupies much of Gaza, per the New York Times.
Trump announced his Board of Peace last fall, saying it would oversee the enactment of the ceasefire. He claimed on Thursday that FIFA would raise $75 million in funding for “projects in Gaza” and said that FIFA would get “the greatest stars in the world to go there.”
Infantino said that it is not only necessary to rebuild houses, hospitals and schools but also rebuild “people, emotion, hope and this is what football, my sport, is about.”
FIFA then revealed in a news release a three-step plan which would include 50 FIFA Arena mini-pitches located near schools and residential areas within three to six months, five full-size pitches across multiple districts for professional use within 12 months, and a state-of-the-art FIFA Academy and a new 20,000-seat national stadium within eighteen months and three years.
In the release on Thursday night, FIFA did not say where the money would come from or how the money would be raised. They also did not say whether the Palestine Football Association had been consulted.
When pressed by The Athletic, FIFA sources, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said they were collaborating with the Board of Peace and assessing from which project to start, who will be the financial contributors and the total amount. They claimed that the Board of Peace already has countries interested in investing, but said they could not disclose the countries involved at this point.
Earlier on Thursday, The Athletic reported that Infantino and his UEFA counterpart Aleksander Ceferin had been accused of “aiding war crimes” and “crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territory” in a complaint filed at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The formal complaint — a “120-page” document filed by advocacy groups Irish Sport for Palestine, Scottish Sport for Palestine, Just Peace Advocates, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, and Sport Scholars for Justice in Palestine — was sent to the ICC Office of the Prosecutor on February 16.
In October, Amnesty International, the global human rights organisation, wrote an open letter to FIFA and UEFA calling on them to “suspend the Israeli Football Association until clubs from settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are removed from its leagues.”
In an interview with Sky News on February 2, Infantino said that implementing a ban on Israel “is a defeat”, adding that he will explore the possibility of changing FIFA’s statutes to prevent national teams being banned, saying they “should actually never ban any country from playing football because of the acts of their political leaders.”