IN NEARLY THREE years of Israeli bombardment, more than 80 percent of the structures in Gaza have sustained damage: homes, schools, hospitals, and at least 160 cultural sites. The Israeli military has extended Gaza’s Yellow Line—territory annexed by the IDF and indicated by cement blocks painted yellow—from 53 percent of Gaza’s land to 64 percent since the 2025 ceasefire. The Great Omari Mosque, likely the oldest mosque in Gaza, and the Church of Saint Porphyrius, considered to be the third oldest church in the world, are rubble. Of the twelve universities in Gaza City not a single one remains. Over 73,000 people have been killed. Not content with the damage they’ve wrought, the people who destroyed Gaza are already considering what to erect in its place. “We have done the demolition phase,” Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, said last fall at a conference in Tel Aviv, “which is always the first phase of urban renewal. Now we need to build.”
Except Smotrich, in his eagerness, skipped a step, one that his allies in the Trump administration particularly relish. Before any concrete is poured, the developer must take to PowerPoint. At the World Economic Forum in January, United States Special Envoy for Peace Jared Kushner, representing President Donald J. Trump’s Board of Peace, fired up a pitch deck for “Project Sunrise,” replete with schlocky visuals of sub-Zaha buildings and high-speed trains. The deck descends from the longer and more detailed “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Trust,” a thirty-eight-page prospectus that was leaked by The Washington Post in August 2025 and whose opening slide envisions transforming the region “from a demolished Iranian proxy [in]to a prosperous Abrahamic ally.” The architectural window dressing may differ from one presentation to the next, but the images of genericized Burj al-Arabs lining the Mediterranean coast are merely variations on the same copy-paste GCC hellscape.
Here we have an annihilationist placemaking worthy of Berman’s Faust, were it not also so breathtakingly stupid.
For the Marxist critic Marshall Berman, the developer is a Faustian figure—though not simply one who sacrifices the future for immediate gain. His Faust is driven by the ambition to remake the world through annihilation, to construct a homogeneous environment from which the past has disappeared without a trace. For the Board of Peace, the flattening of Gaza is an opportunity to take that hypothesis to its logical conclusion. With the unspoken Phase Zero out of the way, the formal Phase One begins in Rafah and Khan Younis. Subsequent phases will progress north toward Gaza City, zoning the region for residential, transportation, parks and recreation, industry, coastal tourism, and data centers.
Though 92 percent of Gaza’s housing stock has been destroyed, much of the vision is devoted to industrial planning. Gaza’s Old City—before the war, home to architecture from the fifth century—becomes a manufacturing zone where low-cost Palestinian labor assembles batteries bound for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Exports would move through a rail hub in Rafah called the Abraham Gateway and a new roll-on/roll-off port, to be financed up to 90 percent by private capital and, therefore, owned and controlled by the highest bidder. The realization of these economic fantasies hinges on the Board of Peace running the Gaza Strip for an undefined “multi-year transition period,” during which “EV Companies gain profits while giving a better future for Palestinians and Israelis,” according to the GREAT Trust prospectus.
But while commodities are afforded free movement, the movement of people is constrained, subordinated to the requirements of the market and Israeli security diktats. The inspiration for the arterial “loops” linking Rafah, Gaza City, and Khan Younis is among the plan’s most obvious, and startlingly unguarded, moments of self-justification: A slide in the GREAT Trust deck acknowledges a precedent in “Haussmann’s strategy.” When Georges-Eugène Haussmann redesigned the French capital at Napoleon III’s directive, his system of boulevards, disguised in the auxiliary ideologies of “breathing space” and economic development, ultimately aided the military in quelling insurrection. Project Sunrise stakes its own claim to breathing space by relocating Gaza’s seat of governance to “New Rafah.” The plans obliterate most of the Jabalia refugee camp, established in 1948 and long a redoubt of Palestinian resistance, conspicuously replacing it with a park at the city’s center. Demolishing a neighborhood peopled by refugees, in the obscene thinking of the GREAT Trust’s authors, is actually a way to “address the root cause of Gaza’s ongoing insurgency: its urban design.” Here we have an annihilationist placemaking worthy of Berman’s Faust, were it not also so breathtakingly stupid.
The images of genericized Burj al-Arabs lining the Mediterranean coast are merely variations on the same copy-paste GCC hellscape.
What will happen to the Palestinians who have called this place home? The hundred thousand new housing units promised for Rafah—which had a prewar population of 280,000, swelled by refugees to more than 1.5 million in 2024—will hardly be enough, even if they were built tomorrow. According to a model developed by two former partners at Boston Consulting Group, that problem can be solved by a mass exodus. The model assumes that 25 percent of Gaza’s population, persuaded by a $9,000 repatriation payment, will choose voluntary departure. Details as to where remaining Palestinians would live during the reconstruction phases and how new properties would be allocated are predictably vague. At Davos, Kushner outlined a specious free-market developmentalism that would make Gazans into productive workers—Project Sunrise would allegedly support five hundred thousand jobs—or, failing that, manage the relocation of the surplus population elsewhere.
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“I’m not interested in history,” Kushner was reported to have said when he joined the second Trump administration. “We’re doing things differently here.” Kushner’s willful ignorance may explain why the Project Sunrise mission statement was littered with mangled bits of Arabic, backwards at the level of both words and sentences. Understanding Kushner’s qualifications as a Middle East diplomat requires some imaginative thinking. In fact, nothing about his tenure as a New York real estate developer would suggest that he knows what he’s doing in that department either. His infamous swing-and-miss at 660 Fifth Avenue necessitated a $1.1 billion eleventh-hour Qatari bailout and still likely inflicted nearly half a billion in losses on Kushner Companies. More recently, the mere announcement of his plans for a resort in Albania spawned a series of protests—the so-called “flamingo revolution”—that threatened to derail the country’s EU accession talks. Neither the fakeness of Kushner’s jobs nor his embarrassing inadequacy in all of them would seem to recommend him for the world-historic task now in his hands.
Fortunately for him, he’s got plenty of help. There is Steve Witkoff, himself a freshly minted billionaire, and Israeli developer Yakir Gabay, who has graciously proffered his services pro bono. Under the Board of Peace’s supervision, a subsidiary body of Palestinian technocrats offers the veneer of representation: The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza is led by civil engineer Ali Shaath, who served as the vice chairman of the Palestinian Housing Council and CEO of the Palestinian Industrial Estates and Free Zones Authority. Shaath is a comprador-cum–project manager, not someone any Gazan elected to speak for them. But the promise of an enduring ceasefire, or merely a lack of better options, has impelled the scheme forward. In July, Hamas announced that it intends to dissolve its government and hand over power to the technocrats so that reconstruction can begin.
Given the charlatans in charge, one might wonder who intends to pay for all this. Slide two of the GREAT Trust pitch deck insists that the plan will rely on “unprecedented public-private partnership to rebuild Gaza.” The mechanism for putting shovels in the ground departs from the liberal-interventionist playbook, in which taxpayer dollars are used to buy regime change and political fealty abroad and to pry markets open for American goods. By contrast, the Board of Peace hopes to entice someone else to split the bill.
At Davos, Kushner outlined a specious free-market developmentalism that would make Gazans into productive workers, or failing that, manage the relocation of the surplus population elsewhere.
In cities across the world, blended finance has become a major instrument for steering private capital toward the built environment. Public funds de-risk projects by socializing potential losses, effectively serving as insurance for investors who can step in and privatize the upside. In Gaza it would look something like this: The United States underwrites the parlous first decade of Project Sunrise with grants and debt guarantees; Gulf sovereign wealth, Turkish capital, and assorted private investors pledge against future returns, monetizing the coastline without shouldering any risk. Because public land stands as collateral and the trust’s yields can be used to service that debt, debt-financing could cover the remainder. The money, in short, is borrowed against revenue that does not yet exist, to be repaid, when it fails to materialize, in Palestinian land the financiers never legally owned.
Neither the fakeness of Kushner’s jobs nor his embarrassing inadequacy in all of them would seem to recommend him for the world-historic task now in his hands.
Israel has said that it won’t sign on to the US plan until Gaza is fully demilitarized. But capital is impatient. The Board of Peace has already designated a “pilot zone” in southern Gaza, intended to intern thousands of Palestinians under Israeli control. Gainsaying Palestinian self-determination is a big tent in American politics: Hillary Clinton, Trump’s erstwhile rival, cravenly backed his efforts. Writing in the Financial Times, Clinton went so far as to declare, with characteristic smugness, that “the world may not like Trump’s Gaza plan—but there is no alternative.”
On the ground, however, Palestinians already are rebuilding, creating their own alternatives without any help from those trying to bribe them to leave. Along with her team members at the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, Sahar Qawasmi rehabilitates buildings in rural Palestine, while Architects for Gaza and the Palestine Regeneration Team review proposals for the Sheikh Radwan Reservoir. Amateur builders Omar Hamad, a former tailor and pharmacist, and Ibrahim Massri, a former teacher, crowdfunded the construction of the first library to open since the war began, with books salvaged from the rubble; the Phoenix Library opened its doors in March. Elsewhere, in the Nuseirat refugee camp, two teenage girls developed a method of brickmaking using concrete, water, and pulverized glass. Displaced five times over, the girls intend to use a grant from the Swiss-based Earth Foundation to share their knowledge. On a larger scale, the Arab League has endorsed a $53 billion reconstruction program laid out by Egypt, and the Phoenix Plan, heralded by Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman, draws almost exclusively on the expertise of Palestinian architects and planners.
There is a word for what Project Sunrise is proposing: urbicide. “City-killing” describes the destruction of all the things that make life in an urban center possible, like buildings, infrastructure, and utilities. The point of the term is not to delimit urbicide from its cognates—ecocide, domicide, genocide. Urbicide is a tool for redefining whom a city is for. Who is in control after the people who used to live there have been killed, removed, or subjugated? Faced with the right of Palestinians to return and live in peace, Gaza’s prospective rentiers can reply as conquerors (and landlords) have for millennia: Possession is nine-tenths of the law.