Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair departs St. Paul’s Cathedral following a memorial service to mark the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London Bombings on July 7, 2025. Credit – Leon Neal—Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s 21-point plan to end Israel’s war in Gaza and redevelop the Gaza Strip brings back a divisive figure to the region.
Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the U.K. from 1997 to 2007, will sit on Trump’s “Board of Peace,” alongside the U.S. President and other leaders who have yet to be announced, according to the plan. The plan has received Israeli and widespread global approval, but Hamas—which said on Tuesday it would begin studying the proposal—has yet to sign on. If it does, the militant group would be required to effectively cede interim governing authority to Blair, who has been described as a “war criminal” by much of the Arab world. Israel has said that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority can have a role in governing the besieged Gaza Strip, while Hamas has previously refused to surrender or completely disarm.
Here’s what to know about Blair, and why his role in the plan is so controversial.
Legacy shaped by war
Blair came to power in 1997 as the head of the U.K.’s Labor Party, with the aspiration: “Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.”
But by the end of his decade-long tenure, which covered two reelections, Blair had ordered British troops into combat more than any other British Prime Minister since World War II. He did not shy away from fraught conflicts at home and abroad, even if his decisions were at times unpopular. In 1998, he secured the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. That same year, the U.K. and the U.S. launched a four-day bombing campaign against then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime over weapons inspections. In 1999, the U.K. took part in NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. In 2000, he sent British forces to intervene on behalf of Sierra Leone’s government in the country’s civil war. And in 2001, he joined the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.
The now-72-year-old’s time in office was perhaps most indelibly marked by his decision to lead the U.K. into war in Iraq, alongside the U.S., in 2003, based on false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. “Blair had drawn on every last ounce of his persuasive skill to make the case for joining the U.S.-led invasion to MPs and the wider public,” the BBC reported in 2017 in a recap of Blair’s legacy.
British forces began withdrawing from the war in 2009, with the final military personnel leaving at the end of the war in 2011. The eight-year-long war killed 179 British servicemembers, close to 4,500 American soldiers, and around 200,000 Iraqi civilians.
The war proved deeply damaging to Blair’s reputation, both at home and in the Middle East. A five-member committee led by civil servant John Chilcot launched in 2009 an inquiry, which concluded in 2016 that Blair had a “far from satisfactory” legal basis to go to war. Blair faced a private war crimes prosecution, but the British high court ruled to block it in 2017.
Francis Beckett, co-author of Blair Inc: The Man Behind the Mask, told Al Jazeera that the Iraq War “was a major turning point” in the public view of Blair. “It’s not just that every year that passes since the Iraq invasion we see more evil results from it, but also it was the way it was done … The fact that he acquiesced in an invasion without any consideration for the future governance of the country began his descent to the point where his resignation as prime minister in 2007 became inevitable because it was very clear that he could not win another general election.”
Blair in the Middle East
Blair has wrestled with the Palestinian question over his time as Prime Minister, as a U.N. envoy, and as a private consultant. As British premier, Blair backed the Oslo Accords, a set of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that negotiated a two-state solution, held talks with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, and pushed former U.S. President George Bush to adopt a “road map for peace,” an unfulfilled plan to secure peace between Israel and Palestinian militants, end Israeli settler expansion in the West Bank, and map out Palestinian statehood.
After resigning from his post in 2007, amid plummeting ratings much to do with the invasion of Iraq, Blair took up the post of Middle East envoy for the Quartet, representing the United Nations, the U.S., the European Union, and Russia. The stated aim of the Quartet is to support “the Palestinian people to build the institutions and economy of a viable, peaceful state in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” according to its website.
At the same time, he launched his consulting firm, Tony Blair Associates, providing advice on economic and governmental reform, and joined JPMorgan Chase as a senior adviser.
Critics and Palestinians have said that Blair oversaw Palestinian economic development during his time as an envoy but failed to stop Israeli settler violence and illegal settlements. He has also been criticized for failing to advance Palestinian statehood. Current British Prime Minister Keir Starmer earlier this month formally recognized a sovereign Palestine.
Some critics have also argued that there was a conflict of interest between Blair’s diplomatic and business roles, with some even having called for him to resign as envoy.
Beckett told Al Jazeera that “most fatally of all, the difficulty was that when he went to meetings in the Middle East, nobody knew which Tony Blair they were seeing—whether it was Tony Blair the Quartet envoy or Tony Blair the patron of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation or Tony Blair the principle of the consultancy firm Tony Blair Associates.”
Jonathan Cook, a British writer who focuses on Israel-Palestine relations, wrote in the Journal of Palestine Studies in 2013 that Blair “has few achievements to show for his years as Quartet Representative, but he likes to trumpet one in particular: his success in 2009 in securing radio frequencies from Israel to allow the creation of a second Palestinian cell phone operator, Wataniya Mobile, in the West Bank.” But the deal, Cook wrote, appeared to benefit JPMorgan, which had provided a loan to Wataniya’s parent company. (Blair said he did not have knowledge of any connection between Wataniya and JPMorgan, and the investment bank said in a TV documentary that it “never raised or discussed with him the two projects you mention.”)
The deal also came at a “high political cost for the Palestinians,” Cook wrote. Israel agreed to release some frequencies in exchange for Palestinian leaders abandoning its effort to pursue at the U.N. evidence of Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza during its 2008–2009 Operation Cast Lead.
“Today, most observers acknowledge that the Quartet’s diplomatic function has all but ended, with the peace process effectively killed by the physical and political separation of the West Bank and Gaza,” Cook wrote. According to Cook, Blair for his part said in 2011, “Our work is based on the belief that economic progress helps the politics work—it is not a substitute. And when the politics is stuck, this is a way to move forward.”
“But the reality is the reverse. A narrow focus on development has actually been a way to keep the politics stuck,” Cook wrote. “Blair’s task of overseeing Palestinian development and institution-building has found its rationale just at the moment when the once-interminable political peace process instituted by the Oslo Accords finally ran aground. Blair’s responsibility appears to be to draw out the technical preconditions for the peace process in a similarly protracted manner.”
Blair served as an envoy till 2015, but has continued his work in the Middle East through his nonprofit, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has advised governments of Gulf states and launched global interfaith educational programs, including in Israel and Palestinian territories. The organization was also reportedly involved in a controversial proposal to reconstruct Gaza, relocate up to 500,000 Palestinians, and transform the land into a “Riviera of the Middle East” with resorts and a manufacturing zone. The institute denied involvement in authoring the plan, and said two of its staff participated in calls but that the proposal is “emphatically not TBI work or ‘joint’ work.”
Blair’s role in Trump’s Gaza plan
Blair reportedly had a hand in crafting Trump’s plan for Gaza, which involves the phasing out of Israel’s military from Gaza, explicitly does not require Gazans to resettle (a controversial suggestion that had been raised by Trump earlier this year), and emphasizes the area’s economic redevelopment. The plan also involves developing a temporary International Stabilization Force, which will “train and provide support to vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza.” The IDF will “progressively hand over” occupied Gazan territory to the ISF until the IDF has completely withdrawn from Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel is barred from occupying or annexing Gaza.
The plan will oust Hamas from Gaza, while a transitional authority “will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program.” The Palestinian Authority has welcomed the plan and pledged to make reforms towards being able to regain governance. Israel has repeatedly said it will not allow the PA to have a role in governance.
Some have suggested that Blair, who is seen as slanted towards Israel and having friendly relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will make the transition to PA governance more palatable to the Israelis.
“The Israelis cannot easily swallow that idea that the Palestinian Authority will have any part at all,” Barak told the Washington Post. “That could be modified somewhat by having someone like Blair in the middle. They respect him.”
British journalist and Blair biographer John Rentoul told the Post, “One of his strengths is that he is pretty unsentimental about working with people that his liberal friends hate, like Trump and Netanyahu.”
But Blair’s potential role in Gaza has also drawn deep concern among critics, and raised skepticism over how well the proposal will go over with Hamas.
“It’s clear that this plan is unrealistic,” 39-year-old Ibrahim Joudeh told AFP from a shelter in southern Gaza. “It’s drafted with conditions that the U.S. and Israel know Hamas will never accept. For us, that means the war and the suffering will continue.”
“There is already suspicion of Tony Blair because of the Palestinian experience when he was the Quartet representative,” Xavier Abu Eid, a former member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s diplomatic negotiating team, told Saudi Arabia-based newspaper Arab News. “But the biggest is over what it means for Palestine as a single political entity, something that was recognized even by Israel in the Oslo Accords. This plan effectively legally separates Gaza from the West Bank and does nothing to explain how they will remain part of the same territory.”
Before the PA welcomed the plan on Monday, Mahmoud Habbash, a senior adviser to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, told the Post, “We don’t need another representative. … The only side that is able to administer Gaza is a Palestinian government and nothing else.”
Simon Frankel Pratt, a senior lecturer of political science at the University of Melbourne, told Australian broadcasting service SBS News, “In the views of most Palestinians, Tony Blair is a war criminal responsible in part for the Iraq war.”
“I don’t think he would enjoy very much legitimacy amongst the Palestinian public or amongst partners in Palestinian government positions,” Pratt added.
“We’ve been under British colonialism already,” Mustafa Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, told the Post. “He has a negative reputation here. If you mention Tony Blair, the first thing people mention is the Iraq War.”
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