Announced with great fanfare by President Joe Biden in March to try to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the pier that the US military put into operation two months later on a beach in the Strip has ended its work, US authorities have confirmed. The mission, which has been plagued by problems and interruptions, “is complete, so there is no longer any need to use the pier,” Brad Cooper, deputy commander of the US Central Command, told reporters. Aid will continue to arrive by sea, but will do so through the Israeli port of Ashdod.
This temporary floating structure, authorised by Israel against the wishes of the UN and humanitarian organisations deployed in Gaza, has involved the intervention of up to a thousand US soldiers and has cost approximately 230 million dollars (about 210 million euros) for a total of about 25 days of operation. Biden said last week that he was “disappointed” with the outcome of the dock project. “I had hoped that it would be more successful,” he lamented.
In total, about 20 million pounds of aid (about nine million kilos) have been unloaded on the pier, Cooper said. They arrived on the Gazan coast by boat from Cyprus. The US military estimates that another 2.25 million kilos are still on land on the island or in transit, which will now go via the port of Ashdod, added the military officer, who considers his country’s objectives to have been met.
The United Nations estimated that 96% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are severely or acutely hungry. Of these, half a million “go days without eating” and another 1.6 million people are unable to get enough food. The temporary port came into operation a few days after Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing, which separates Gaza from Egypt and, until then, was the main point of arrival for humanitarian aid into the Strip. Today, more than two months later, that crossing remains closed.
Since the pier was put into operation in mid-May, sea conditions have barely allowed the infrastructure – some 370 metres long – to be active for a third of the days until the end of June, when it was finally put out of operation. It was planned to remain in operation until the end of July.
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The growing security challenges surrounding the transport and distribution of aid within the Gaza Strip have not helped the pier to continue operating either. Aid has been piling up on the beach and on the esplanades of border crossings such as Kerem Shalom, as the chaos in Palestinian territory caused by the war makes it difficult to load it onto trucks and transport it to food warehouses or hospitals.
In the war alone, 197 of the 13,000 employees of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), the main institution providing support to the Gazan population, have died.
The idea now is to move the unloading of aid arriving from Cyprus to the Israeli port of Ashdod, some twenty kilometres north of Gaza. There, on more than one occasion, Israeli ultra-nationalist groups have demonstrated against their country allowing the sending of aid to Gaza.
From the beginning, both the United Nations and the various humanitarian organizations deployed in the Palestinian enclave were against the project because they believed that land transport was the quickest, cheapest and most useful way to break the blockade imposed by Israel.
The end of the pier closes one of the routes for aid to Gaza that COGAT (the Israeli Ministry of Defense agency that manages civil affairs in Gaza and the West Bank) boasted about last week in an attempt to hold the UN responsible for the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. Colonel Elad Goren added to this maritime route the launching of parachutes with pallets from the air and three land points in Gaza: Kerem Shalom in the south; Erez in the north; and Highway 96 in the center.
Controversy has also surrounded the pier in the US political scene, as a cause of friction in Congress between Democrats and Republicans. The right called it a ploy by Biden to give the impression of helping the Palestinians after months of war by supporting and arming their Israeli ally. Republican Senator Roger Wicker considers it a miracle that no Americans have died and went so far as to call the pier a “national shame.”
In mid-March, before the US military installed the pier, the Safeena mission was the first to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea. It enabled the unloading of 200 tons of food transported from Cyprus by ship in the Strip. Open Arms, from the Catalan NGO of the same name. At the time, it was thought that it would be possible to keep this maritime route open despite the complexities it presented.
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