Gaza Pier: Publicity stunt doomed on day one

The United States is considering temporarily dismantling its humanitarian aid pier off Gaza for the second time due to poor conditions. Damaged and repaired twice already, the pier faces questions about continued UN use for aid distribution. Critics claim the objective of the pier was to distract attention from Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza and restricted aid access.

Scott Paul of Oxfam criticized the pier as a costly distraction from addressing critical humanitarian obstacles in Gaza. Israel’s war has led to blocked land crossings, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Despite limited US pressure, President Biden's administration reported no instances of Israel restricting aid.

Biden announced the floating pier to increase humanitarian assistance. However, critics argue it tacitly admits Israel’s systematic aid blockage while failing to address core issues. Aid agencies remain skeptical, emphasizing the need for overland routes. The Pentagon claims 2,500 metric tons of aid have been delivered via the pier, but this is only a fraction of pre-war aid levels.

The pier’s initial US$320 million cost, later reduced to US$230 million, drew criticism for high expenses amid blocked existing aid routes. Former US officials acknowledged the pier's symbolic gesture but noted it has not alleviated the crisis. The humanitarian pier, announced during Biden’s State of the Union address, faced damage from unexpected storms shortly after its opening.

The Israeli military’s recent massacre in the Nuseirat refugee camp further complicated the pier’s use. The presence of Israeli military helicopters near the pier raised concerns about the humanitarian operation’s integrity. The World Food Program paused aid deliveries from the pier following the incident.

In response to anticipated high seas, the pier is set for temporary dismantling and relocation to Israel. Delays, repairs, and suspended deliveries have marred the project, highlighting its ineffectiveness in addressing Gaza’s humanitarian needs.

In conclusion, the Gaza pier has been a costly, ineffective public relations effort, failing to address the core issues hindering humanitarian aid in Gaza. Sustainable overland routes and genuine political pressure on Israel are essential for resolving the crisis.

US military repairs Gaza pier

A top US military official said humanitarian aid would begin flowing again in the coming days through the maritime corridor. The pier has been attached back to the Gaza beach after the causeway, the part that connects to the shore, was broken apart during high winds and heavy seas on May 25.

Vice Admiral, Brad Cooper, deputy commander of US Central Command, said the US military was moving with a sense of urgency to re-open the pier to deliver critical humanitarian aid to Gaza.

"We want to seize this opportunity and get the aid to the people as quickly as possible," he said. 

The pier is just one point of access for humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, but in its roughly weeklong operation before it broke apart, more than two million pounds of aid entered the territory. 

Cooper said he expects one million pounds of aid to be delivered over every two-day period once operations resume.

The Gaza pier has cost the US about US$230 million, which includes the cost of repairing it. Still, that figure is down US$90 million from an initial estimate.

Sen. Roger Wicker, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said continuing operations with the pier was a bad idea. "It continues to put US troops in harm's way without any plan for ensuring that aid is delivered successfully to Gazans in need," said Wicker, calling it an "irresponsible" and "expensive experiment."

Cooper acknowledged concerns that the pier could face more trouble from bad weather but stressed the US military had backup plans.

"We do have a series of contingency plans to adjust and adapt to the weather,” he said. 

Israel controls all of the crossings into Gaza, where Palestinians are struggling to access food and water as Israeli forces wage war against militant group Hamas, and says it is doing everything possible to get aid into the strip.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in an update that 9 out of 10 children are experiencing severe food poverty in Gaza.

The office also said that recent Israeli military activities, including in the southern city of Rafah, "have significantly destabilized humanitarian aid flows, forcing UN and partners to reorganize the entire operation."

 

Rafah: Food distribution suspended

The United Nations said it has suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering.

A spokesperson for the UN's World Food Program (WFP) announced that food aid would halt in Rafah because of a lack of supplies and insecurity, according to The Associated Press.

Writing on X, the WFP wrote that the rest of Gaza was also at risk. "Our stocks are fast running out without continued access."

Palestinians are struggling to access basic necessities in Gaza as Israel carries out its war against Hamas.

Israeli troops seized a border crossing that had facilitated supply deliveries in Rafah earlier this month, and Israel now controls every aid checkpoint. Humanitarian aid groups have accused Israel of impeding aid efforts.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN on Tuesday that Israel has been trying to get aid into Gaza but Hamas has been "looting" it.

"They were taking it for themselves or extorting the population. We were letting the aid in from the start," Netanyahu said. "We're getting hundreds of trucks every day in."

A State Department review earlier this month said the US has "deep concerns" about Israel potentially impeding aid into Gaza, though it did not reach a conclusion on the matter. It also found the country is taking steps to improve the situation, even if still inadequate.

To address the crisis, the US military constructed a pier that connects to a beach in Gaza. It allows aid coming from the island nation of Cyprus to reach Gaza through a maritime corridor.

But for the past two days, no aid has gotten into Gaza from the pier area, U.N. officials told Reuters.

Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said more than 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance has been delivered through the pier, though that means it has arrived for distribution and not all of it has been delivered yet.

Noting the difficulties, Ryder said there are discussions to find alternative routes for the safe movement of staff and cargo from the pier distribution area but said Gaza was a combat zone, complicating distribution. 

"We've been very clear from the beginning that we are going to take a crawl-walk approach to make sure that we are implementing this system in a way where we're working out the processes, the procedures," he said.

"You're going to see as we work together the amount of aid increase and the ability to get it distributed increase."

 

Aid reaches Gaza shore in first sea delivery

According to Saudi Gazette, the first maritime humanitarian aid shipment to Gaza has been unloaded on to the shore. The US charity behind the mission, World Central Kitchen, is carrying out the mission in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates.

Aid agencies have repeatedly warned that no method of relief is as effective as delivery by land, but they say Israeli restrictions mean a fraction of what is needed is getting in.

The shipment contained 200 tons of food desperately needed for Gaza, which the UN says is on the brink of famine. It marks the start of a trial to see if the sea route would be more effective than air and land deliveries.

Aid agencies have accused Israel of impeding aid deliveries, a charge vehemently denied by Israeli officials. They say Israel is allowing aid through two crossings in the south and has blamed aid agencies of logistical failures.

Saturday's shipment arrived on board Spanish charity ship Open Arms.

Its cargo includes beans, carrots, canned tuna, chickpeas, canned corn, parboiled rice, flour, oil, salt and pallets of dates, which hold spiritual significance during Ramadan.

In a statement, World Central Kitchen (WCK) said, "All cargo was offloaded and is being readied for distribution in Gaza." Teams worked through the night to get the aid on to dry land.

Gaza has no functioning port, so a jetty stemming from the shoreline was built by WCK's team.
However, there are few details on how the aid distribution will work, with UN relief agencies having described huge obstacles to getting relief supplies to those in need.

Earlier, WCK's founder, celebrity chef José Andrés, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that all the food aid from the barge had been loaded into 12 lorries.

"We did it!" he wrote, adding that this was a test to see if they could bring even more aid in the next shipment — up to "thousands of tons a week".

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said troops had been deployed to secure the shoreline.

This delivery has been highly anticipated since the ship set off from the port of Larnaca on Tuesday.

If this sea mission is deemed a success, other aid ships will likely follow as part of an international effort to get more aid into Gaza. The ships would use a newly opened sea route to travel directly to the region.

The US is planning to build its own floating dock off the coast to boost sea deliveries. The White House says it could see two million meals a day enter Gaza, but while a military ship is en route with equipment on board to build the dock, questions remain about the logistics of the plan.

The World Food Program had to temporarily pause its land deliveries after convoys came under gunfire and looting. And an air drop turned deadly last week when five people were reportedly killed when a parachute failed and they were hit by the aid package.

The UN has warned that famine is "almost inevitable" in Gaza without urgent action, and the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has accused Israel of creating a "manmade" disaster and using starvation as a weapon of war.

 

A pier for Gaza can change almost nothing

A few observations on US President Joe Biden building a “temporary pier” – or what his officials are grandly calling a “port” – to get aid into Gaza:

1. Though no one is mentioning it, Biden is actually violating Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza with his plan. Gaza doesn’t have a sea port, or an airport, because Israel, its occupier, has long banned it from having either.

Israel barred anything getting into Gaza that didn’t come through the land crossings it controls. Israel stopped international aid flotillas, often violently, from reaching Gaza to bring in medicine. The blockade also created a captive market for Israel’s own poor-quality goods, like damaged fruit and vegetales, and allowed Israel to skim off money at the land crossings that should have gone to the Palestinians in fees and duties.

2. It will take many weeks for the US to build this pier off-shore and get it up and running. Why the delay? Every western capital, including the United States, has supported the blockade for the past 17 years.

The siege of Gaza caused gradual malnutrition among the enclave’s children, rather the current rapid starvation. By helping Israel inflict collective punishment on Gaza for all those years, the US and Europe was complicit in a gross and enduring violation of international law, even before the current genocide.

With his pier, Biden isn’t reversing that long-standing collusion in a crime against humanity. He has stressed it will be temporary. In other words, it will be back to business in Gaza as usual afterwards: any children who survive will once again be allowed to starve in slow-motion, at a rate that doesn’t register with the establishment media and put pressure on Washington to be seen to be doing something.

3. Biden could get aid into Gaza much faster than by building a pier, if he wanted to. He could simply insist that Israel let aid trucks through the land crossings, and threaten it with serious repercussions should it fail to comply. He could threaten to withhold the US bombs he is sending to kill more children in Gaza. Or he could threaten to cut off the billions in military aid Washington sends to Israel every year. Or he could threaten to refuse to cast a US veto to protect Israel from diplomatic fallout at the United Nations. He could do any of that and more, but he chooses not to.

4. Even after Biden buys Israel a few more weeks to further aggressively starve Palestinians in Gaza, while we wait for his temporary pier to be completed, nothing may actually change in practice. Israel will still get to carry out the same checks it currently does at the land crossings but instead in Lanarca, Cyprus, where the aid will be loaded on to ships. In other words, Israel will still be able to create the same interminable hold-ups using “security concerns” as the pretext.

5. Biden isn’t changing course – temporarily – because he suddenly cares about the people, or even the children, of Gaza. They have been suffering in their open-air prison, to varying degrees, for decades. If he had cared, he would have done something to end that suffering after he became president. If he had done something then, October 7 might never have happened, and all those lives lost on both sides – lives continuing to be lost on the Palestinian side every few minutes – might have been saved.

And if he really cared, he wouldn’t have helped Israel in its efforts to destroy UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians and a vital lifeline for Gaza, by freezing its funding, based on unevidenced claims against the agency by Israel.

No, Biden doesn’t care about Palestinian suffering or about the fact that, while he’s been busy eating ice cream, many, many tens of thousands of children have been murdered, maimed or orphaned – and the rest starved. He cares about the polls. His timetable for helping Palestinians is being strictly dictated by the schedule of the presidential election. He needs to look like Gaza’s saviour when Democrats are deciding who they are voting for.

He and the Democratic Party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.