An ambitious U.S. effort to get
aid into Gaza via a floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea has gotten off to a sluggish start, facing many of the same logistical challenges that have throttled broader attempts to ease the humanitarian crisis in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The Pentagon spent $320 million and engaged 1,000 soldiers and sailors to open a major maritime corridor last week, delivering on President Biden's promise in March that the U.S. military would install a temporary dock off the Gaza coast for cargo ships to unload food, water and other supplies. Fourteen ships from the U.S. and other countries are involved in a mission supported by humanitarian groups and several nations including Israel.
But in the first week of operations, only 820 tons of aid was delivered through the pier, of which around two-thirds reached distribution points within Gaza, the Pentagon said Thursday. That is roughly equivalent to 71 truckloads—far below the initial target of 90 truckloads a day, and about 15% of the estimated minimum daily need for a population of more than two million people facing crisis-level acute food insecurity.
The dock suffered another setback Saturday. Part of the support system for a floating pier
broke off on Saturday morning amid choppy waters off the Gaza coast, the U.S. military said in a statement.
One step to improving aid to Gaza came Friday when Biden secured a commitment from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi to resume shipments of U.N.-provided assistance for civilians in the southern part of the strip.
That aid is funneled through Egyptian territory to the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel. Egypt had been holding back that assistance to try
to pressure Israel to end its Rafah operation. Another border crossing at Rafah remains closed.
U.S. officials have said that the floating pier, soon after achieving its initial target, would expand capacity to enable 150 trucks a day to enter Gaza, assisting at least 500,000 people a month. Sullivan denied that the current lower levels indicated poor planning, blaming it instead on "a dynamic environment."
Scaling up the operation could prove difficult.
The maritime corridor is a cumbersome system with multiple potential bottlenecks. Food, medical supplies and other goods from around the world are sent by air or sea to the island nation of Cyprus, where the aid is screened and packaged onto shipping pallets in the small port of Larnaca. A large military or commercial ship then transports the pallets some 200 miles across the Mediterranean Sea to a floating platform built by the U.S.
There, the pallets are put into trucks, which are driven onto smaller military vessels that carry them about 6 miles to a floating U.S.-built causeway secured to the beach by Israeli army engineers. The trucks drive a few hundred feet down the causeway and onto the beach. In a zone protected by Israeli soldiers, aid workers transfer the pallets onto a separate fleet of trucks that are used by aid groups to complete the final leg to warehouses and distribution points inside Gaza.
Weather poses a particular threat. Choppy waters in the Mediterranean Sea could damage the pier and make it unsafe for people to be on it, military officials have warned. Storms delayed installation of the pier for several days and could interrupt operations again. The summer is expected to be mostly calm, but if the pier survives until September it will likely have to stop operations around then and be dismantled.
breachmedia.ca
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