Israel / Palestine

On 29 September 2026, the Council appointed Col. Vittorio Stingo as the new Head of the EU Border Assistance Mission for the Rafah Crossing Point (EUBAM Rafah). He will take up his duties on 1 November 2026 for an initial mandate of eight months, until 30 June 2027. He succeeds Ms. Nataliya Apostolova, who has headed the mission since 2023.

[…] Following the coordinated strategic review conducted by the European External Action Service and approved by the Political and Security Committee and on the basis of the letters provided by the Palestinian Authority and Israel, the Council decided to renew the mandates of the EU Border Assistance Mission for the Rafah Crossing Point (EUBAM Rafah) and of the EU Police Mission in the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS) for nine months until 30 June 2027.

US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace has announced a $2.45bn (£1.85bn) Gaza recovery plan at a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The funding will be spread across 66 programmes over six months, and directed at housing, diesel generation and waste removal, among other needs. But the board admitted substantial donations were still needed, with $18bn pledged but only $280m handed over so far. It estimates full recovery and reconstruction will require about $71bn over the next decade.

The UN chief warned on Tuesday that the two-State solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict is at risk of collapse amid illegal Israeli settlement expansion and annexation. António Guterres was speaking at a high-level meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

The Board of Peace will hold a briefing for representatives from dozens of countries on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly next week to update them on efforts to implement US President Donald Trump’s plan for rebuilding the Gaza Strip.

Israel must implement its commitments under the Gaza peace roadmap for the process to move forward, Nickolay Mladenov, High Representative for Gaza at the Board of Peace, said on Monday. … Mladenov warned that failure to advance the roadmap could make the two-state solution “practically impossible.” “The only way that we can build back to that is if we have transitional governance, if we have decommissioning of weapons, if we have withdrawal in Gaza,” he said. 

A senior official on US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace has criticised Israel's continuing air strikes on Gaza, as well as the actions of the Palestinian armed group Hamas. Nickolay Mladenov warned that a collapse of last October's ceasefire would be "a point of no return" for the region. He was speaking to the UN Security Council after Israel rejected the 15-point roadmap for Hamas's disarmament, which was announced by the Board of Peace last month.

Gaza’s humanitarian situation is at “an absolute breaking point" ahead of winter, with 2 million people still trapped and families enduring the cold season in rubble and tents, the Security Council heard today.

Israel's plans to open up tenders for the construction of some 1,200 settlement homes in a strategically important part of the occupied West Bank have sparked fresh condemnation by major Western powers.

Reports of new illegal Israeli outposts in the occupied West Bank raised alarms at UN Headquarters on Wednesday while the UN rights office called on Israel to condemn its national security minister’s words that incite “violence amounting to atrocity crimes” against Palestinians.