Beachside luxury resorts. High-speed rail. AI-optimized smart grids. An extremely ambitious plan to rebuild the Gaza Strip as a high-tech coastal hub – described as a “Middle East Riviera” – is finally revealed. Welcome to “Project Sunrise,” the Trump administration’s pitch to foreign governments and investors to turn Gaza’s rubble into a futuristic coastal destination.
A team led by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, two top White House aides, developed a draft proposal to convert the Stone Age enclave into a gleaming metropolis. The plan was presented in a 32-page PowerPoint slides, with images of coastal high-rises alongside charts and cost tables, as well as steps to take Gaza residents from tents to penthouses and from poverty to prosperity.
The presentation is marked “sensitive but unclassified,” and doesn’t go into details about which countries or companies would fund Gaza’s rebuilding. Nor does it specify where precisely the 2 million displaced Palestinians would live during reconstruction. The U.S. has shown the slides to prospective donor countries, including wealthy Gulf kingdoms, Turkey and Egypt.
Some U.S. officials who have reviewed the plan have serious doubts about how realistic it is. They are skeptical because there’s one huge problem – Hamas terrorists have refused to disarm for the plan to take effect. Even if Hamas agrees to surrender, it’s a challenge for the U.S. to convince wealthy nations to foot the bill for transforming a dangerous site like Gaza into a high-tech cityscape.
Others believe it offers the most detailed and optimistic vision yet of what Gaza could look like if Hamas laid down its arms and turned the page on decades of conflict. “They can make all the slides they want,” – said Steven Cook, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “No one in Israel thinks they will move beyond the current situation and everyone is okay with that.”
“Nothing happens until Hamas disarms. Hamas will not disarm, so nothing will happen,” – he said.
Asked for comment, a White House spokesperson said Trump continues to monitor Gaza and the peace plan. “The Trump administration will continue to work diligently with our partners to sustain a lasting peace and lay the groundwork for a peaceful and prosperous Gaza.” But financing remains a major challenge.
The project would cost a total of US$112.1 billion over 10 years, though Washington has positioned itself as an “anchor” investor, proposing close to US$60 billion in grants and loan guarantees during the first decade. Gaza could then self-fund many projects over the following years of the plan, and eventually pay down its debt as improvements fuel local industry and the broader economy.
Kushner, Witkoff, senior White House aide Josh Gruenbaum and other U.S. officials pulled the proposal together over the past 45 days, officials said, adding they received input from Israeli officials, people in the private sector and contractors. If the project gets under way, they plan to update and revise the numbers about every two years as it unfolds, officials said.
Supporters of the project insist that allowing Gaza to go undeveloped and let a burgeoning humanitarian crisis fester is a far worse alternative, adding it is better to realize Trump’s vision of turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” If the security conditions allow, Trump officials said they could put the plan into action in as soon as two months.
However, the obstacles confronting Project Sunrise are formidable, and may not have solutions for years. The most fundamental contradiction appears within the proposal itself – the plan cannot begin unless Hamas agrees to fully demilitarise, surrendering all weapons and dismantling its tunnel network. The United States and Israel insist this is non-negotiable.
And Hamas is unlikely to give up its arms and its coercive control over Gaza to facilitate an American real estate project closely aligned with Israeli strategic interests. While there were indications that Hamas might relinquish administrative control to a Palestinian governing authority, Israel has objections to the presence of certain Palestinian technocrats, further undermining consensus.
After thousands of Israeli strikes on Gaza during the two year Israel-Hamas war, some 10,000 bodies lay under 68 million tons of rubble, officials estimate. The ground is toxic and littered with unexploded bombs. And Hamas fighters remain entrenched in miles of tunnels. The proposal acknowledges on the second page, bold and in red, that Gaza’s reconstruction depends on Hamas “to demilitarize and decommission all weapons and tunnels.”
“You are not going to convince anyone to invest money in Gaza if they believe another war is going to happen in two, three years,” – Secretary of State Marco Rubio said about the general situation in the enclave. “We have a lot of confidence that we are going to have the donors for the reconstruction effort and for all the humanitarian support in the long term,” – he said.
The Project Sunrise comprises a four-stage reconstruction process stretching over two decades, starting in the south with Rafah and Khan Younis before moving northward to “center camps” and, finally, the capital Gaza City. A road map shows the rebuilding project starting with the removal of destroyed buildings, unexploded ordnance and Hamas’s tunnels while residents are provided with temporary shelter, field hospitals and mobile clinics.
Once cleared, the construction of permanent housing, medical facilities, schools and religious spaces would begin. Roads would get paved, power lines connected, crops planted. Only after that would the longer-term goals of lavish beachfront properties and modern transportation hubs be realized.
Ultimately, a new administrative centre – “New Rafah” – would house governance institutions and provide roughly 100,000 housing units, 200 or more schools, and more than 75 medical facilities and 180 mosques and cultural centers. By the tenth year, the monetization of 70% of Gaza coastline is projected to generate more than US$55 billion in long-run investment returns.
The plan estimates the entire effort would cost US$112.1 billion, including the public-sector payroll, over those 10 years, with much of it at the start going to humanitarian needs. Just under US$60 billion would be financed by grants (US$41.9 billion) and new debt (US$15.2 billion) in that time period, with the U.S. offering to “anchor” 20% or more of the support. The World Bank would also play a financing role.
Before entering politics, Jared Kushner built a career in commercial real estate, helping run his family’s property empire – Kushner Companies – which was founded by Charles Kushner. Though he helped broker the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab countries in Trump’s first term, nothing matches the scale or complexity of the undertaking taking shape in Gaza.
Since leaving the White House in 2021, Kushner has repositioned himself as an investor in a wide range of businesses. He founded Affinity Partners, a Miami-based private-equity firm that has raised more than US$3.5 billion, much of it from Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds, including those from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Saudi alone has invested US$2 billion in Affinity Partners.
Affinity has taken stakes in sectors such as technology, infrastructure, energy and asset management, including investments in companies like an Israeli insurance and asset-management firm, and U.S. and Middle Eastern tech ventures. Jared Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners has recently dropped out of Paramount Skydance’s hostile takeover bid – US$30 per share cash – for Warner Bros. Discovery.
Kushner also has been involved in other real-estate projects since leaving the White House. He has pursued a high-profile luxury resort development on Sazan Island in Albania, aiming to transform it into a flagship Mediterranean destination. In the Middle East, breaking ground on Project Sunrise would only come toward the end of a long and fragile peace process between Israel and Hamas.
Trump’s three-phase Gaza Peace Deal is still in “Phase 1,” as Hamas has yet to hand over its last hostage – the body of Ran Gvili. If that happens, Israeli forces can begin their withdrawal from Gaza in “Phase 2” as Hamas lays down its arms, vowing never to seek power in the enclave again. Only then, with Gaza no longer home to Hamas militants or occupied by Israeli forces, could the multi-year rebuild begin in “Phase 3.”
The U.S. has considered other similar proposals for Gaza, including one called the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust – or The GREAT Trust. Under this proposal, the enclave would turn into a high-tech, AI-fueled megacity the U.S. would initially help administer while Palestinians could voluntarily relocate.
But that plan, which the Washington Post reported in September, was devised by Israelis supportive of a controversial aid-distribution plan for Gaza while financial planning was done by a team at Boston Consulting Group. It was created before the October cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
U.S. officials say “Project Sunrise” shows the administration is now directly engaged in nation building in Gaza, even if senior Trump aides reject that characterization. “If you say something enough people will believe it so if they say they aren’t nation-building, they hope people will believe it,” – said Cook, the CFR senior fellow. “But they are nation-building.”
Still, Project Sunrise sounds less like a peace accord and more like a luxury development prospectus bulldozed into one of the world’s most volatile regions. It offers a spectacular vision of what Gaza might one day become, but provides little clarity on how to navigate the political, security and humanitarian realities. Until those basic issues are addressed, the Riviera project is a fantasy and unlikely to take off.
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December 21st, 2025 by financetwitter
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