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The US military is nearing completion of a $320 million floating pier off Gaza. This is a complex project designed to provide humanitarian assistance from the sea to a besieged enclave where the most reliable land routes have been disrupted by politics and war.
Hundreds of American soldiers have spent weeks building the structure intended to ease the dire humanitarian crisis in the strip. US naval ships are transporting special equipment to a point about 2 miles off the coast where the relief ships from Cyprus are supposed to dock.
From there, a fleet of smaller ships will take the goods to a site on the Gaza Strip coast where the Israeli military has cleared 70 hectares of land. The Pentagon estimates the initiative has already cost $320 million. Test runs on the pier could begin no sooner than mid-May and are expected to operate only until the fall if the weather changes, two people familiar with the project say.
The project, promised by US President Joe Biden in early March, aims to overcome some of the hurdles that Israeli politics and bureaucracy have created in getting enough aid to the territory to save Gaza from the brink of famine.
But the need for such a complex and costly effort to transport aid 250 miles from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus remains questionable. Gaza has several border crossings from which the enclave “could be flooded with aid,” U.S. officials have repeatedly said.
Instead, hundreds of trucks carrying urgently needed food, medicine and other supplies remain stuck outside Gaza’s land borders, awaiting clearance from the Israeli military or unable to enter the enclave because damaged roads and lawlessness have made distribution difficult.
“It’s a wasteful distraction,” a senior U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said of the new pier. “There are roads, there are border crossings – there are [already] Help is waiting outside Gaza.”
Humanitarian groups and the United States agree that trucking goods into Gaza is the best way to ensure that Palestinian civilians receive the thousands of tons of aid that the United Nations and other international organizations have purchased.
In March, the United Nations declared that all of Gaza was on the brink of man-made famine and that famine was spreading in the northern half of the enclave.
Since Israel refused to allow the UNRWA agency to distribute sea aid, the United States struck a deal with the World Food Program to take over the task of transporting some of the aid to the northern Gaza Strip. The rest of the aid, which has traveled several days by ship, is being taken to U.N. warehouses in southern Gaza, some of which are just a few minutes’ drive from Israeli territory.
The inefficiency and cost of these deliveries mirrors that of the pallets of aid dropped by air into Gaza in recent weeks, with military transport ships carrying at most a few truckloads of aid dropped from the back of the planes. Many end up in the water and some have even attacked and killed Palestinians.
Persuading Israel to streamline and facilitate the transfer of aid to Gaza has become an international diplomatic endeavor. It took weeks for Israel, under pressure from the United States, to partially open a border crossing so aid trucks could drive the 30 minutes from the port of Ashdod.
The UN and other organizations are already complaining about an insufficient number of scanners at Israeli security checkpoints, arbitrary rejections of several trucks and inadequate security on the main roads within the Gaza Strip for the movement of aid trucks.
Aid destined for the US pier will be self-inspected by Israel in Cyprus, with US officials hoping that deliveries will be expedited “once humanitarian assistance reaches the beach in the Gaza Strip.” According to the United Nations and other aid organizations, Israeli inspections at land borders have repeatedly presented a bottleneck.
A significant portion of Israel’s right wing opposes the delivery of aid to civilians in Gaza until Hamas releases the hostages it is still holding, and police have done little to stop regular protests along the route that trucks would have to take. and to dismantle the Kerem Shalom border crossing in the south of the enclave at the entrance to the Gaza Strip.
A Jordanian aid convoy traveling through Israel was stopped on Wednesday by protesters who dumped its supplies on the road, according to a video posted online. Israeli police said they were investigating.
At full capacity, the pier and adjacent infrastructure could potentially handle the equivalent of about 150 relief trucks, a U.S. official told reporters last week. Before the war began on October 7, Gaza received about 500 aid trucks per day, while over the past six months it has averaged about 200 per day.
The United Nations estimates that Gaza will need up to 1,000 aid trucks a day for the next few weeks to overcome the severe shortage of food, medicine and other essential supplies that has emerged in recent months.
In a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged that Israel had made some improvements since early April, when Biden urged Netanyahu to streamline aid deliveries to Gaza.
“Progress is real, but given the need, given the immense need in Gaza, it must be accelerated and sustained,” Blinken said Wednesday at the port of Ashdod.