US pitches ‘Project Sunrise’ plan to turn Gaza into high-tech metropolis
The Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff drafted blueprint could see the U.S. commit to roughly 20% of some reconstruction costs over 10 years.
WASHINGTON—Beachside luxury resorts. High-speed rail. AI-optimized smart grids.
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 bombed-out enclave into a gleaming metropolis. In 32 pages of PowerPoint slides, replete with images of coastal high-rises alongside charts and cost tables, the plan outlines steps to take Gaza residents from tents to penthouses and from poverty to prosperity.
The presentation is labeled “sensitive but unclassified," and does not 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, U.S. officials said, 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 that Hamas will agree to disarm in the first place for the plan to take effect—and even then that the U.S. could convince wealthy nations to foot the bill for transforming a dangerous postwar environment 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 who just traveled to Israel but did not see the draft. “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.
Ask 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."
The project, according to the draft, would cost a total of $112.1 billion over 10 years, though the U.S. would commit to being an “anchor" supporting nearly $60 billion in grants and guarantees on debt for “all the contemplated workstreams" in that time period. Gaza could then self-fund many projects over the following years of the plan, the proposal projects, 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."
The hurdles for developing the area are tremendous. 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. Hamas fighters remain entrenched.
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."
If the security conditions allow, Trump officials said they could put the plan into action in as soon as two months.
“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 Friday about the general situation in the enclave.
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com and Peter Grant at peter.grant@wsj.com
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