" Gaza 2035 " is the name of a proposal for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip by 2035 , officially unveiled by the Israeli government in May 2024. The plan aims to transform Gaza into a regional hub for trade, technology, and tourism , with the goal of integrating it into the global economy and reducing its dependence on Hamas . However, the plan does not envision the creation of an independent Palestinian state and raises concerns about Palestinian rights and self-determination .
Trusteeship : The plan proposes an international trusteeship of the Gaza Strip for a transitional period, overseen by Israel and other international actors.
Gaza-Arish-Sderot Free Trade Area : A proposal to create a free trade area linking Gaza, Arish (Egypt) and Sderot (Israel) , facilitating trade and economic integration.
Infrastructure and sustainability : The plan includes the construction of modern infrastructure, including a seaport, an international airport, and renewable energy facilities, to promote sustainable development.
Technology and innovation Silicon Valley " in Gaza is proposed , with the aim of developing advanced technological sectors and attracting international investment.
Tourism and culture : The plan includes the development of tourism, with the enhancement of the Mediterranean coast and the promotion of Palestinian cultural heritage.
Gaza 2035: Netanyahu's Vision for Gaza
For nearly a century, the Israeli project has maintained the Gaza Strip as a tightly controlled laboratory for testing new weapons, surveillance, and containment technologies. A few months before the brief and fragile ceasefire agreement of January 2025, a PDF produced by the nation-state spread across the internet. This PDF could be considered an imperial weapon in itself.
Gaza 2035 —a document produced in the spring of 2024 Benjamin Netanyahu 's vision for the 25-mile- —demonstrates the boundlessness of settler colonial imagination when the subject of containment is perceived as a thing of the past. A and energy hub where currently stand miles of tents and smoldering rubble .
Border infrastructure is being erased to make way for a borderless metropolis of solar farms, electric vehicle factories, and high-speed rail lines under Israeli security control . The accompanying text calls for Palestinians to manage " safe zones " under the supervision of Arab states.
Not coincidentally, a rail line connecting Gaza to NEOM , a planned city under construction by Saudi Arabia Tabuk province , is one of many proposals found in the document for a regional trade network. With a similar imperative to " modernize " the Middle Eastern coast by any means necessary, Saudi authorities were recently authorized to use " lethal force " against those resisting relocation to make way for The Line , a 105-mile-long mirrored-glass megastructure at the center of NEOM . Several Saudi villages (including Khuraybah, Sharma, and Gayal ) have been demolished since 2018 with little to show for the destruction; the construction timeline has been delayed since first public announcement as the project's supporters insinuate connections to global economic centers—including a future Gaza where Israel's genocidal campaign is imagined to have succeeded.
The "Gaza 2035" document is a post-war reconstruction proposal for the Gaza Strip, presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the spring of 2024. Although not officially confirmed by the Israeli government, the plan has been widely circulated online and has sparked widespread discussion and criticism.
The plan calls for a radical transformation of the Gaza Strip, aiming to transform it into a modern industrial and commercial hub. Some of the key elements include:
Phase 1: Humanitarian aid and safe zones
Creation of safe zones under the control of a coalition of Arab countries ( Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco ) to provide humanitarian assistance and begin reconstruction.
Phase 2: Rehabilitation and Development Authority
Establishment of a Palestinian-led rehabilitation authority to oversee the reconstruction and economic management of the Strip.
Phase 3: Palestinian Self-Government
Gradual transfer of governance responsibilities to the Palestinians, with the possibility of unification with the West Bank, subject to demilitarization and deradicalization.
Infrastructure and Economic Development
Projects for the construction of modern cities, solar power plants, electric vehicle factories, and high-speed railways.
Connection with NEOM
Proposed high-speed rail line connecting Gaza to the futuristic NEOM city in Saudi Arabia, as part of a regional trade network.
The plan has drawn widespread criticism due to several concerns:
Colonialism and Israeli Control
Many observers believe the plan represents a form of colonialism in disguise, with Israel maintaining substantial control over the Gaza Strip, despite claims of a withdrawal.
Exclusion of Palestinians
The plan has been criticized for lacking consultation with Palestinians and failing to address their aspirations for self-determination.
Geopolitical implications
The inclusion of Arab countries in the plan is seen by some as an attempt to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world, but without resolving the fundamental issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vast image datasets used to train the AI come from the field of urban planning, a design discipline that, from its perch high in the technological stratosphere longer than the state of Israel, has helped homogenize and smooth colonial geographies. In these images of a colonized Gaza, early twentieth-century farmlands, mid-century highways, and early twenty-first-century skyscrapers merge into a single gelatinous whole.
Presented in this way, the plan revives a kind of blueprint initiated by the colonial collages of 20th-century urban planning. For example, 1904 design for Manila cuts through the historic urban layout with wide avenues, while preserving the Spanish colonial architecture of previous centuries.
" Gaza 2035 ," particularly with its aerial view as its main image, recalls many other bird's-eye views of vertically imposed urban projects proposed throughout the 20th century to provide territories with infrastructures adhering to the Western aesthetic model. In the bird's-eye views of Le Corbusier's "Plan Obus ," the Algiers that is shown is a city where the predominantly Muslim slums are surveyed from above, from the 10th-century casbah where European settlers resided. As Zeynep Çelik , conducting these "top-down" views imposes oppressive conditions; they establish constant visual surveillance of the local population and establish a hierarchical social order in the urban image, with the dominant at the top and the dominated below. This system of habitual surveillance in Gaza partly made a totalizing project like "Gaza 2035" plausible in the eyes of its creators .
In the current era—the one rather ostentatiously labeled "post-colonial" in globalization—various investment groups and business interests are channeling resources to build new cities from scratch, in places deemed devoid of cultural history. The logic is clearly different: each territory is not considered a place where lives develop, but rather a testing ground for technologies related to the Internet of Things and AI, which until now have only been tested within the infrastructural confines of existing cities.
A case in point is East Solano (also known as " California Forever "): a project co-proposed by Jan Sramek and other Silicon Valley , aimed at creating a brand-new city for 400,000 residents in Solano County (near Silicon Valley), presented to the public through AI-generated imagery too beautiful to be believed. Streets crowded with pedestrians, open skies, and an unprecedented density of technological experimentation woven into the city's urbanism: a city where technology takes center stage.
In " Gaza 2035 ," the disruptive, demolishing, and annihilating thrust of the Zionist project combines with the generative capabilities of artificial intelligence—emphasizing the role of urban planning in rapidly "organizing" the territory, excluding human empathy from visual creation . The marriage between Zionism and AI is further fueled by the capitalist impulse to remove every obstacle to the international development of neoliberalism .
The idea of a nation state, as we have seen, is often supported by fantasies legitimized by sophisticated methods of visual representation. Artificial intelligence is only the latest technology adopted for this purpose.
Yet, in the meantime, a project of opposing representation exists: a Palestine without borders, radically different . A project that arises not from insensitive machines, but from ordinary people. Many paths toward a different Palestinian autonomy are already in motion, emerging as alternatives to the Western order . But one question remains: how will they generate their images?
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