WASHINGTON — The US-Israeli war against Iran appeared to break out at an inopportune time for the Board of Peace tasked with negotiating Hamas’s disarmament.

Just nine days earlier, on February 19, the US-led international panel overseeing the postwar management of the Gaza Strip managed to secure $17 billion in pledges for humanitarian relief and reconstruction in the enclave.

The nascent Board of Peace’s ability to galvanize such support — conditioned on Hamas giving up its weapons — suggested that momentum in the international arena was moving against the terror group.

But the war quickly turned attention elsewhere in the region. Gulf countries that had offered to donate the largest sums to the Board of Peace suddenly found themselves among the hardest hit by Iran’s retaliatory strikes, and now seem poised to deprioritize foreign aid in favor of more national defense spending.

Days after the US-Israel war against Iran began on February 28, a senior US official speaking to The Times of Israel was emphatically unbothered.

“Hamas is watching what is happening to Iran and understands that its last lifeline is fading away,” the US official maintained, as Tehran was still in shock over the opening US and Israeli strikes on the country’s leaders and military assets.

Even if the US needed to shift its focus to Iran for the brief period of time that it expected the war to last, Hamas only stood to lose with each new blow inflicted on its benefactors in Tehran, the........

© The Times of Israel