Ammon News - The US administration has prepared a plan for the reconstruction of Gaza under the name "Project Sunrise," to transform the sector into a state-of-the-art technological city, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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 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, 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 didn’t 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.

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.”

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.

“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,” Rubio said.

Kushner, Witkoff and Gruenbaum met with officials from Egypt, Turkey and Qatar in Miami on Friday to discuss developments in Gaza, officials said.

A 20-plus-year road map shows the effort 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.

The rebuild would proceed in four phases, starting in the south with Rafah and Khan Younis before moving northward to “center camps” and, finally, the capital Gaza City.

One slide, titled “New Rafah,” sees it serving as Gaza’s “seat of governance” and home to more than 500,000 residents. They would live in a city with more than 100,000 housing units, 200 or more schools, and more than 75 medical facilities and 180 mosques and cultural centers.

The plan estimates the entire effort would cost $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 $60 billion would be financed by grants ($41.9 billion) and new debt ($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.

Costs are projected to taper off as Gaza makes money heading into the plan’s second decade. The proposal calls for monetizing 70% of Gaza’s coastline beginning in year 10, and estimates the glitzy riviera could lead to over $55 billion in long-run investment returns.

Before entering politics, Kushner built a career in commercial real estate, helping run his family’s property empire. 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 $3.5 billion, much of it from Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds.

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.