Gaza has been devastated by more than 8 months of Israeli operations.
Washington:
The controversial US effort to increase aid deliveries to Gaza by building a temporary pier has faced repeated problems, with bad weather damaging the structure and causing other disruptions in the arrival of desperately needed aid.
More than 4,100 metric tons (nine million pounds) of aid has been delivered through the $230 million pier project so far, but it has only been operational for limited periods, falling short of President Joe Biden’s promise that it would allow a “surge massive” in the assistance that arrives in Gaza “every day”.
The coastal territory has been devastated by more than eight months of Israeli operations against the Palestinian militant group Hamas, uprooting Gaza’s population and leaving it in dire need of aid.
“The Gaza pier has regrettably represented an extremely expensive distraction from what is truly needed and what is also legally required,” said Michelle Strucke, director of the Humanitarian Agenda Center for Strategic and International Studies.
This is “safe and unimpeded humanitarian access for humanitarian organizations to provide aid to a population in Gaza suffering historic levels of deprivation,” she said.
U.S. forces also abandoned aerial aid, but that, plus dockside deliveries, “were never intended to replace the staggered and sustainable access to land crossings that provided safe access for aid workers to deliver aid,” Strucke said.
“Pursuing them has consumed time, energy and more than $200 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars.”
Damaged pier, stranded vessels
Biden announced during his State of the Union address in March that the U.S. military would establish the pier, and American troops began building it the following month, initially working offshore.
But in a sign of troubles to come, high seas and winds required construction to be moved to the Israeli port of Ashdod.
The pier was completed in early May, but weather conditions meant it was unsafe to immediately transport it to the site, and it was only attached to the Gaza coast in the middle of the month.
High seas caused four U.S. Army ships supporting the mission to break free from their moorings on May 25, stranding two of them, and the pier was damaged by severe weather three days later, requiring sections to be repaired and rebuilt in Ashdod.
It was refloated on the coast on 7 June, but aid deliveries were soon halted for two days due to poor weather conditions.
The pier then had to be removed from the coast and moved to Ashdod on June 14 to protect it from the high seas. It was returned to Gaza this week and aid deliveries have resumed.
Raphael Cohen, senior political scientist at the research group RAND Corporation, said “the effort at the pier has not yet produced the results the Biden administration had hoped for.”
“In addition to climate issues, it has been quite expensive and has not resolved the operational challenges of getting aid to Gaza,” he said.
Suspended aid distribution
Cohen said that despite problems with the pier, it provides another entry point for aid and allows assistance to be brought in even when land crossings are closed – a persistent problem that has worsened the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
And he said the effort could also help improve future deployments of temporary military dockside capability, which was last used operationally more than a decade ago in Haiti.
In addition to weather conditions, the project faces a major challenge in terms of distributing aid arriving via the pier, which the UN World Food Program has decided to halt while it assesses the security situation – an assessment that is still ongoing.
That announcement came after Israel conducted an operation nearby earlier this month that freed four hostages but which health officials in Hamas-ruled Gaza said killed more than 270 people.
The UN said it welcomes all efforts to bring aid, but that land routes are the most important routes for assistance to arrive.
Strucke emphasized that “what Gazans need is not the appearance of help – they need real help to reach them.”
Washington “should be very careful not to support actions that may look good on paper to increase aid delivery routes, but that do not result in aid actually reaching Palestinians in need on a large scale,” she said.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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