Economy & Aid
Bashar Masri raised Rawabi, Palestine's first planned city, from bare hills
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Nine kilometres north of Ramallah, a crescent of pale stone towers rises from a hilltop that held nothing but scrub two decades ago. Rawabi — "the hills" — is the first planned Palestinian city in living memory, and it exists because one man decided that Palestinians should not have to wait for statehood to build like a state.
That man is Bashar Masri.
Born in Nablus in 1961 — a nephew of the industrialist Munib al-Masri, TIME noted in its profile of the project — he grew up amid the demonstrations of the occupied West Bank, left to study chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, and built a career in Washington before the Oslo years drew him home.
In 1994 he founded Massar International, the investment house that became Rawabi's engine.
A city from scratch#
The idea took shape in 2007: not another housing project, but an entire city — master-planned streets, schools, offices, a commercial core — conceived, financed and built by Palestinians. Rawabi's own plan maps some 6,000 homes across 22 neighbourhoods for more than 25,000 eventual residents, with room to grow toward 40,000.
Qatar answered the financing call. Through the Bayti Real Estate Investment Company, Masri's Massar International and Qatari Diar shouldered a development bill that grew to about 1.4 billion dollars — the largest private-sector project in modern Palestinian history.
$1.4 billion in private investment — the largest private project in modern Palestinian history.
Rawabi development figures
Building it meant building against the occupation's grid. The city's sole access road crosses Israeli-controlled Area C and lived for years on temporary permits; the water connection that makes a city drinkable was withheld until 2015; every load of stone and steel negotiated checkpoints. Masri pressed the project through all of it, and the first families moved in during the summer of 2015, TIME reported.
The scale of the bet: homes, neighbourhoods, investment and the amphitheatre on the hill. Graphic: Times of Palestine.
What stands on the hill today#
Rawabi today is thousands of residents and counting — young professional families drawn by mortgages, fibre internet and ordinary municipal order that the West Bank's older cities struggle to offer. The Q Center mall brought international retail; a 15,000-seat amphitheatre stages concerts above the valley; an English-language academy schools the city's children.
Work came with the homes. CBS's 60 Minutes found the city functioning as the West Bank's largest private job creator, its tech hub filling with Palestinian engineers writing code for international firms — proof that the city was built to earn, not just to sleep.
The builder's standing grew with it. Fortune ranked Masri among the world's 50 greatest leaders in 2018, and his pragmatist's reputation has kept him in the room where Gaza's post-war reconstruction is being discussed in Washington.
That prominence has also drawn legal fire. In April 2025, families of American victims of the 7 October attack filed a civil suit in a US federal court alleging that Gaza properties his companies developed — two hotels and the Gaza Industrial Estate — concealed Hamas tunnels, The Times of Israel reported.
Masri called the complaint baseless, said he was shocked to learn of it through the media, and moved for its dismissal; the allegations remain claims before a court, not findings.
The proof of concept#
What Rawabi settles is an argument. For decades, the case against Palestinian statehood leaned on the claim that Palestinians could not run the institutions a state requires. On a hilltop north of Ramallah stands a privately financed answer: a city with a master plan, a payroll, a school calendar and a skyline — planned by Palestinian architects, financed by Palestinian and Arab capital, and filled by Palestinian families.
Masri has always framed the city that way — a national project wearing a business plan. The hills still have room, the plan still has phases, and the first organized Palestinian city is no longer a rendering. It has residents, and they are home.
