US pitches ‘Project Sunrise’ plan to turn Gaza into high-tech metropolis
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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
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