JERUSALEM (AP) — Modern cities with sleek high-rises, a pristine coastline that attracts tourists, and a state-of-the-art port that juts into the Mediterranean. This is what Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law and Middle East adviser, says Gaza could become, according to a presentation he gave at an economic forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In his 10-minute speech on Thursday, Kushner claimed it would be possible — if there's security — to quickly rebuild Gaza's cities, which are now in ruins after more than two years of war between Israel and Hamas.
“In the Middle East, they build cities like this ... in three years," said Kushner, who helped broker the ceasefire in place since October. “And so stuff like this is very doable, if we make it happen.”
That timeline is at odds with what the United Nations and Palestinians expect will be a very long process to rehabilitate Gaza. Across the territory of roughly 2 million people, former apartment blocks are hills of rubble, unexploded ordnance lurks beneath the wreckage, disease spreads because of sewage-tainted water and city streets look like dirt canyons.
The United Nations Office for Project Services says Gaza has more than 60 million tons of rubble, enough to fill nearly 3,000 container ships. That will take over seven years to clear, they say, and then additional time is needed for demining.
Kushner spoke as Trump and an assortment of world leaders gathered to ratify the charter of the Board of Peace, the body that will oversee the ceasefire and reconstruction process.
Here are key takeaways from the presentation, and some questions raised by it:
Kushner said his reconstruction plan would only work if Gaza has “security” — a big “if.”
It remains uncertain whether Hamas will disarm, and Israeli troops fire upon Palestinians in Gaza on a near-daily basis.
Officials from the militant group say they have the right to resist Israeli occupation. But they have said they would consider “freezing” their weapons as part of a process to achieve Palestinian statehood.
Since the latest ceasefire took effect Oct. 10, Israeli troops have killed at least 470 Palestinians in Gaza, including young children and women, according to the territory's Health Ministry. Israel says it has opened fire in response to violations of the ceasefire, but dozens of civilians have been among the dead.
In the face of these challenges, the Board of Peace has been working with Israel on “de-escalation,” Kushner said, and is turning its attention to the demilitarization of Hamas — a process that would be managed by the U.S.-backed Palestinian committee overseeing Gaza.
It's far from certain that Hamas will yield to the committee, which goes by the acronym NCAG and is envisioned eventually handing over control of Gaza to a reformed Palestinian Authority. Hamas says it will dissolve the government to make way, but has been vague about what will happen to its forces or weapons. Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority.
Another factor that could complicate disarmament: the existence of competing armed groups in Gaza, which Kushner's presentation said would either be dismantled or “integrated into NCAG.” During the war, Israel has supported armed groups and gangs of Palestinians in Gaza in what it says is a move to counter Hamas.
Without security, Kushner said, there would be no way to draw investors to Gaza and or stimulate job growth. The latest joint estimate from the U.N., the European Union and the World Bank is that rebuilding Gaza will cost $70 billion.
Reconstruction would not begin in areas that are not fully disarmed, one of Kushner’s slides said.
When unveiling his plan for Gaza's reconstruction, Kushner did not say how demining would be handled or where Gaza’s residents would live as their areas are being rebuilt. At the moment, most families are sheltering in a stretch of land that includes parts of Gaza City and most of Gaza's coastline.
Talk of building new, modern cities has left many Palestinians worried that returning to their homes or rebuilding them won’t be possible.
“I was planning to pitch a tent where my old house was, and gradually rebuild my life again,” said Ahmed Awadallah, who is living with his family in one of the many displacement camps in the city of Khan Younis.
If the high-rises Kushner envisions ever get built, he thinks his family might, at best, end up in a small apartment in one of them.
Bassil Najjar, who is staying in the same tent camp as Awadallah, said he believes the promised high-rises are not meant for people from Gaza. His torched house is in an area currently under Israeli control.
“I have lost hope to return to my house,” he said Friday.
In Kushner's vision of a future Gaza, there would be new roads and a new airport — the old one was destroyed by Israel more than 20 years ago — plus a new port, and an area along the coastline designated for “tourism” that is currently where most Palestinians live. The plan calls for eight “residential areas” interspersed with parks, agricultural land and sports facilities.
Also highlighted by Kushner were areas for “advanced manufacturing,” “data centers,” and an “industrial complex,” though it is not clear what industries they would support.
Kushner said construction would first focus on building “workforce housing” in Rafah, a southern city that was decimated during the war and is currently controlled by Israeli troops. He said rubble-clearing and demolition were already underway there.
Kushner did not address whether demining would occur. The United Nations says unexploded shells and missiles are everywhere in Gaza, posing a threat to people searching through rubble to find their relatives, belongings, and kindling.
Rights groups say rubble clearance and demining activities have not begun in earnest in the zone where most Palestinians live because Israel has prevented the entry of heavy machinery.
After Rafah will come the reconstruction of Gaza City, Kushner said, or “New Gaza,” as his slide calls it. The new city could be a place where people will “have great employment," he said.
Nomi Bar-Yaacov, an international lawyer and expert in conflict resolution, described the board’s initial concept for redeveloping Gaza as “totally unrealistic” and an indication Trump views it from a real estate developer's perspective, not a peacemaker's.
A project with so many high-rise buildings would never be acceptable to Israel because each would provide a clear view of its military bases near the border, said Bar-Yaacov, who is an associate fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
What's more, Kushner’s presentation said the NCAG would eventually hand off oversight of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority after it makes reforms. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has adamantly opposed any proposal for postwar Gaza that involves the Palestinian Authority. And even in the West Bank, where it governs, the Palestinian Authority is widely unpopular because of corruption and perceived collaboration with Israel.
Toqa Ezzidin in Cairo and Danica Kirka contributed from London.
From left, United States Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio prior to a Board of Peace charter announcement during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Jared Kushner speaks after the signing of a Board of Peace charter during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Jared Kushner speaks after the signing of a Board of Peace charter during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The bloodiest crackdown on dissent since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution is slowly coming into focus, despite authorities cutting off the Islamic Republic from the internet and much of the wider world.
Cities and towns smell of smoke as fire-damaged mosques and government offices line streets. Banks have been torched, their ATMs smashed. Officials estimate the damage to be at least $125 million, according to an Associated Press tally of reports by the state-run IRNA news agency from over 20 cities.
The number of dead demonstrators reported by activists continues to swell. Activists warn it shows Iran engaging in the same tactics it has used for decades, but at an unprecedented scale — firing from rooftops on demonstrators, shooting birdshot into crowds and sending motorcycle-riding paramilitary Revolutionary Guard volunteers in to beat and detain those who can’t escape.
“The vast majority of protesters were peaceful. The video footage shows crowds of people — including children and families — chanting, dancing around bonfires, marching on their streets,” said Raha Bahreini, of Amnesty International. "The authorities have opened fire unlawfully.”
The killing of peaceful protesters — as well as the threat of mass executions — have been a red line for military action for U.S. President Donald Trump. An American aircraft carrier and warships are approaching the Mideast, possibly allowing Trump to launch another attack on Iran after bombing its nuclear enrichment sites last year. That risks igniting a new Mideast war.
Iran's mission to the United Nations did not respond to detailed questions from the AP regarding the suppression of the demonstrations.
The demonstrations began Dec. 28 at Tehran’s historic Grand Bazaar, initially over the collapse of Iran's currency, the rial, then spread across the country.
Tensions exploded on Jan. 8, with demonstrations called for by Iran's exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi. Witnesses in Tehran told the AP before authorities cut internet and phone communication that they saw tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets.
As communications failed, gunfire echoed through Tehran.
“Many witnesses said they had never seen such a large number of protesters on the streets,” said Bahar Saba of Human Rights Watch. “Iranian authorities have repeatedly shown they have no answers other than bullets and brutal repression to people taking to the streets.”
Ali Akbar Pourjamshidian, a deputy interior minister speaking on state TV Wednesday, acknowledged the violence began in earnest on Jan. 8.
“More than 400 cities were involved," he said.
By Jan. 9, Revolutionary Guard Gen. Hossein Yekta, previously identified as leading plainclothes units of the force, went on Iranian state TV and warned “mothers and fathers” to keep their children home.
“Tonight you all must be vigilant. Tonight is the night for keeping mosques, all bases everywhere filled with ‘Hezbollahi,’” Yekta said, using a word for “followers of God” that carries the connotation of fervent supporters of Iran's theocracy.
Already weakened by the 12-day war Israel launched against Iran in June, the authorities decided to fully employ violence to end the demonstrations, experts said.
“I think the regime viewed it as this was a moment of existential threat and that they could either allow it to play out and allow the protests to build and allow foreign powers to increase their rhetoric and increase their demands on Iran,” said Afshon Ostovar, an expert on the Revolutionary Guard and professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California.
"Or they could turn out the lights, kill as many people as necessary ... and hope they could get away with it. And I think that’s what they ultimately did.”
In Iran, one of the main ways its theocracy can squash demonstrations is through the Basij, the Guard's volunteer arm.
Mosques in Iran include facilities for the Basij. Guard Gen. Heydar Baba Ahmadi was quoted by the semiofficial Mehr news agency in 2024 as estimating “79% of Basij resistance bases are located in mosques and 5% in other holy places.”
Iranian state media repeatedly has aired images of mosques damaged in the protests without exploring their links to the Basij.
“Most neighborhood Basij bases are co-located with mosques and most neighborhood Basij leaders are associated with the mosque leadership," Ostovar said, adding that demonstrators “going after regime targets” associated with repression would have considered them “a legitimate part of it.”
Videos show Basij holding long guns, batons and pellet guns. Anti-riot police can be seen wearing helmets and body armor, carrying assault rifles and submachine guns.
The videos show police firing shotguns into crowds, something authorities deny despite corpses showing wounds consistent with metal birdshot. Scores have reportedly suffered blinding eye wounds from birdshot — something seen in the protests around the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini.
Iran's semiofficial ILNA news agency reported that Tehran's Farabi Eye Hospital, the premiere clinic for eye injuries, called in “all current and retired doctors” to help those injured.
We “received accounts that the security forces were just firing relentlessly at protesters,” said Bahreini of Amnesty International.
"They’re not just targeting one or two people to create a climate of terror for people to disperse ... but just relentlessly firing at thousands of protesters and chasing after them, even as they were fleeing so that more people were just collapsing to the ground with severe gunshot wounds.”
For two weeks, Iran offered no overall casualty figures. Then on Wednesday, the government said 3,117 people were killed, including 2,427 civilians and security forces. That left another 690 dead that Pourjamshidian identified as “terrorists.”
That conflicts with figures from the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which put the death toll on Saturday at 5,137, based on activists inside Iran verifying fatalities against public records and witness statements. It said 4,834 were demonstrators, 208 were government-affiliated personnel, 54 were children and 41 were civilians not participating in protests.
Death tolls in Iran have long been inflated or deflated for political reasons. But the fact that Iran's theocracy offered any death toll — and gave a number beyond any other political unrest to strike the country in the modern era — underlines the scale of what happened.
It also provides a justification for the ongoing mass arrest campaign and internet shutdown. State media report dozens to hundreds of people detained daily.
Pourjamshidian also gave an extensive list of vandalism from the protests and crackdown, including 750 banks, 414 government buildings, 600 ATMs and hundreds of vehicles that sustained damage.
Meanwhile, uncertainty looms for Iran's theocracy over what Trump may or may not do.
Traditionally, Iranians hold memorial services for their late loved ones 40 days after their deaths — meaning the country could see renewed demonstrations around Feb. 17. Online videos from Behesht-e Zahra, the massive cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran, show mourners chanting: “Death to Khamenei!”
Satellite photos from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by the AP show large numbers of cars daily at Behesht-e Zahra’s southern reaches, where those killed in the demonstrations are being buried.
Elaheh Mohammadi, a journalist at Tehran's pro-reform newspaper Ham Mihan, recently noted it had been shut by authorities. She said journalists were working on stories about Behesht-e Zahra they weren't able to publish.
“We send out a message to let people know we’re still alive,” Mohammadi wrote online. “The city smells of death.”
“Hard days have passed and everyone is stunned; a whole country is in mourning, a whole country is holding back tears, a whole country has a lump in its throat."
In this frame grab from footage circulating on social media from Iran shows protesters taking to the streets despite an intensifying crackdown as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world in Tehran, Iran, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026.(UGC via AP)
In this frame grab from video obtained by the AP outside Iran, a masked demonstrator holds a picture of Iran's Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi during a protest in Tehran, Iran, Friday, January. 9, 2026. (UGC via AP)
FILE - Protesters march on a bridge in Tehran, Iran, on Dec. 29, 2025. (Fars News Agency via AP, File)
This frame grab from videos taken between Jan. 9 and Jan. 11, 2026, and circulating on social media purportedly shows images from a morgue with dozens of bodies and mourners after crackdown on the outskirts of Iran's capital, in Kahrizak, Tehran Province. (UGC via AP)
FILE - In this photo obtained by The Associated Press, Iranians attend an anti-government protest in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 9, 2026. (UGC via AP, File)
