The U.S. military has begun helping build a makeshift port off the coast of Gaza to bring food, water and medicine to the area, a spokesman said Thursday, amid fears of famine in the area.
U.S. ships are involved, Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder told reporters, adding: “I think the indications are now realistic, early May” that the port will be ready.
In the meantime, work will continue with the international community to bring aid supplies to the Gaza Strip through other routes, Ryder said.
At the beginning of March, the US government announced that, given the humanitarian emergency in the Palestinian area, it would help build a temporary port to bring food, water and medicine to the war zone.
The U.S. plan was to build a floating pier off the coast where merchant ships carrying relief supplies could dock. The goods would then be transferred to other ships and taken to a floating causeway. They would then be unloaded there.
The United States recently called on its ally Israel to quickly expand aid deliveries to civilians as Gaza faces famine.
The Gaza war was triggered by the unprecedented massacre with more than 1,200 deaths that militants from the Palestinian Hamas movement and other Islamist groups carried out in Israel on October 7th.
Israel responded with massive airstrikes and a ground offensive, resulting in rising civilian casualties and catastrophic conditions.
This has led to growing international criticism of Israel and pressure to allow more humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, where the situation is dire. According to aid organizations, more than a million people are at risk of starvation.
Israeli reports said unidentified attackers fired mortar shells at the makeshift port site during a visit by UN staff. Militant Palestinian Islamists were suspected.
Ryder spoke of reports that some shells had been fired at the site, but said that had no impact on construction plans and that it happened before the U.S. military began work.
Ryder made it clear again that there are no plans for US forces to advance into the Gaza Strip itself, which has been under siege by Israel for months following a terrorist attack within the Jewish state.
Israel’s COGAT agency, which coordinates government activities in the Palestinian territories, said “terrorists” were behind the attack, which took place while U.N. personnel were at the site on Wednesday.
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops led the UN personnel to safe rooms, it said. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.
As Israel prepares for a military operation in Rafah on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi rejected the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Cairo fears that a planned advance on the southern border town, the last remaining Hamas stronghold in Gaza after months of Israeli attacks in the north and central coastal strip, would trigger a mass exodus to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
“Egypt took a clear stance from the first minute [of the war] “I completely reject the forced migration of Palestinians from their land to Sinai or any other place in order to save the Palestinian cause from liquidation and protect Egypt’s national security,” al-Sissi said in a televised address.
The Israeli offensive on Rafah will have “catastrophic consequences” for the humanitarian situation in Gaza and for peace and security in the region, according to a statement from the Egyptian president.
Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, but Israel’s military operation in Gaza has inflamed popular sentiment in the world’s largest Arab country.
Rafah is the last holdout for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the ongoing war in which nearly 35,000 Palestinians have died.
Some 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinian civilians have left Rafah since April 7, the Jerusalem Post reported Thursday, citing the army.
An Israeli military operation in Rafah will worsen the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave, according to aid organizations.
But Israeli radio station Kan reported Thursday that the Jewish state is taking precautions to limit the loss of life after widespread Western pressure.
The attack begins with an evacuation of civilians that could last up to five weeks. In this first phase of the ground operation, civilians in Rafah will be relocated to safer locations, the report said.
Israel’s allies and critics have been calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for months to call off the invasion of Rafah, fearing mass civilian casualties.
More than a million displaced Palestinians from other parts of the Gaza Strip have found refuge there. Rafah is also the location of the main crossing through which aid supplies enter the area.
Despite the pressure being exerted on Israel, the government argues that it must continue with the ground operation to achieve its goal of dismantling Hamas.