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The US military is nearing completion of a $320mn floating pier off Gaza, a complex project to allow seaborne humanitarian aid to a besieged enclave where the most reliable land routes have been disrupted by politics and war.
Hundreds of American troops have spent weeks building the structure that aims to allay the dire humanitarian crisis in the strip, with US naval vessels ferrying specialised equipment to a point about 2 miles offshore where the aid ships from Cyprus are supposed to dock.
From there, a fleet of smaller craft will take the goods to a site on the Gaza shore, where 70 acres of land have been cleared by the Israeli military. The Pentagon estimates that the initiative has already cost $320mn. Test runs on the pier could begin by mid-May at the earliest, and it is only expected to operate until the autumn, when the weather changes, according to two people familiar with the project.
The project that was promised by US President Joe Biden in early March is aimed at bypassing some of the hurdles that Israeli politics and bureaucracy have created in getting enough aid into the territory to rescue Gaza from the precipice of a famine.
But the necessity of such a complex and costly effort to transport aid 250 miles from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus remains in question. Gaza has several border crossings from which the enclave could be “flooded with aid”, as US officials have repeatedly said they want.
Instead, hundreds of trucks of badly 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 has made distribution difficult.
“It’s a wasteful distraction,” a senior UN official, who requested anonymity, said of the new pier. “There are roads, there are border crossings — there’s [already] aid waiting outside Gaza.”
Humanitarian groups and the US agree that transporting goods into Gaza by truck is the best way to ensure that Palestinian civilians receive the thousands of tonnes of aid that the UN and other international bodies have purchased.
The UN said in March that all of Gaza was on the verge of a man-made famine, and that starvation was spreading through the northern half of the enclave.
With Israel refusing to allow the UNRWA relief agency to distribute the seaborne aid, the US brokered a deal with the World Food Programme to take over the job of getting some of the aid into northern Gaza. The rest of the aid, which will have travelled days by ship, will be taken to UN warehouses in southern Gaza, some of which are within a few minutes drive from Israeli territory.
The inefficiency and cost of these deliveries mirror that of the pallets of aid airdropped into Gaza in recent weeks, with military transport vessels carrying at most a few truckloads of supplies that are thrown from the back of the planes. Many land in the water and some have even struck and killed Palestinians.
Convincing Israel to streamline and facilitate the transfer of aid into Gaza has become an international diplomatic endeavour. It took weeks of US pressure for Israel to partially open a crossing to allow aid trucks to drive the 30 minutes from Ashdod port.
Even now, the UN and other agencies complain of an inadequate number of scanners at Israeli security checks, arbitrary refusals of a number of trucks and inadequate safety on the main roads within Gaza for aid trucks to travel.
The aid destined for the US pier will be inspected by Israel in Cyprus itself, with US officials hoping that it will speed up deliveries “once the humanitarian assistance hits the beach” in Gaza. Israeli inspections at land borders have been a recurring bottleneck, the UN and other aid agencies have said.
A sizeable portion of Israel’s right wing opposes the delivery of aid to Gazan civilians until Hamas releases the hostages it still holds, and police have done little to break up periodic protests along the route that trucks would have to take, and at the entrance to the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south of the enclave.
A Jordanian aid convoy travelling through Israel was on Wednesday stopped by protesters who dumped its supplies on the road, according to video posted online. The Israeli police said they were investigating.
At full capacity, the pier and its adjoining infrastructure may be able to handle the equivalent of about 150 trucks of aid, a US official told reporters last week. Before the war started on October 7, Gaza received about 500 trucks of aid per day, while it has averaged about 200 per day in the past six months.
The UN estimates that Gaza needs as many as 1,000 trucks of aid every day for the next several weeks to overcome the deep shortage of food, medicine and other critical supplies that has built in the past few months.
In a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken acknowledged that Israel has made some improvements since early April, when Biden pushed Netanyahu to streamline the movement of aid into Gaza.
“The progress is real but given the need, given the immense need in Gaza, it needs to be accelerated, it needs to be sustained,” Blinken said at the Ashdod port on Wednesday.
David Turner is a globe-trotting journalist who brings a global perspective to our readers. With a commitment to shedding light on international events, he explores complex geopolitical issues, offering a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
