Kushner, Witkoff Pitch Gaza Reconstruction as $50B Play

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff may have turned from property deals to peace deals, but they’re framing the rebuilding of Gaza as both.

In an extended “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, the developer duo outlined what amounts to a roughly $50 billion master plan to reconstruct Gaza’s war-shattered housing and infrastructure.

Witkoff said the pair is working on early plans with international partners; a master plan has been mooted for two years.

“Jared’s been pushing this and we’re working together on it and I think if the world saw the progress so far they’d be pretty impressed,” Witkoff told interviewer Lesley Stahl.

The two, who helped broker the recent ceasefire agreement, said a newly formed “Board of Peace” would oversee contracting and financing for the redevelopment. Witkoff, founder of the Witkoff Group, told “60 Minutes” the group has already begun discussions with regional contractors.

“The money raising we think is the easy part,” he said, noting how the implementation of the master plan would be the real challenge.

Both men appeared to frame their real estate backgrounds as an asset, not a conflict of interest; Affinity Partners, Kushner’s private equity firm, has raised billions from wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

“If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal we were able to get done, that freed these hostages, would not have occurred,” Kushner said.

“We have trusted relationships in the Arab world and even in Israel, where we’ve both done business in the past. But that means they trust us. We understand their cultures. We understand how they work. And we’re able to use that knowledge and skill set to try to do things that advance the world,” he added.

Previous reporting on the ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas involved invocations of Kushner and Witkoff’s former lives as real estate developers.

“In New York real estate, you’re always negotiating back and forth,” Kushner told the New York Times this month. “But there’s a lot to be negotiated before you get the contract and you put money up hard. I think we’re just used to complex deals that are very dynamic, and with complex characters as well.”

— Holden Walter-Warner