PHIL STEWART and IDREES ALI, of Reuters, report on a controversial attempt to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza…
Washington DC, US
Reuters
The first time President Joe Biden’s administration considered ordering the US military to build a floating pier off Gaza to deliver aid in late 2023, it was put on the backburner.
The United States was under pressure to ease the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn Palestinian enclave, which had been worsened by Israel’s closure of many land border crossings, and sea deliveries were seen as a possible solution.
US Admiral Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a career Navy surface warfare officer, told a meeting that he was very concerned that the sea could become too rough for a pier to deliver humanitarian aid and laid out weather-related risks, a former US official and a current US official said.
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, near the Gaza coast, on 25th June, 2024. PICTURE: Reuters/Amir Cohen/File photo
It wasn’t until early 2024 that the idea came up again as the situation in Gaza grew more desperate and aid organisations warned that mass famine among Palestinian civilians was looming.
“I was hopeful that would be more successful.”
– Joe Biden, speaking to reporters on 11th July.
“We sort of reached a point where it seemed appropriate to take more risk because the need was so great,” a former senior Biden administration official said.
The resulting pier mission did not go well.
It involved 1,000 US troops, delivered only a fraction of the promised aid at a cost of nearly $US230 million, and was from the start beset by bad luck and miscalculations, including fire, bad weather and dangers on shore from the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Biden, after promising a “massive increase” in aid, acknowledged that the pier had fallen short of his aspirations.
“I was hopeful that would be more successful,” he told reporters on 11th July.
The internal discussions about the Gaza pier, including discarded options to briefly deploy troops to the enclave, have not been previously reported.
The pier mission, which was formally a week-and-a-half ago, was the most controversial of the US military’s attempts to help contain the fallout from the Israel-Hamas war that erupted on 7th October, 2023, and has drawn criticism from Biden’s Republican critics and many current and former aid workers.
The effort also underscores the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s struggles to bring the conflict to a close, both of which are in focus during his visit to Washington this week.
The Pentagon referred questions about the pier to remarks made at a 17th July briefing with Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of US Central Command. In it, Cooper said the mission was a success, delivering the largest amount of aid ever into the Middle East.
Mike Rogers, the Republican who leads the Pentagon’s oversight committee in the House of Representatives, called the pier “an embarrassment”.
“The pier was an ill-conceived political calculation by the Biden administration,” Rogers told Reuters.
US President Joe Biden delivers a prime-time address to the nation about his approaches to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, humanitarian assistance in Gaza and continued support for Ukraine in their war with Russia, from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, US, on 19th October, 2023. PICTURE: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/Pool/File photo
With alarm rising over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in 2023, Curtis Reid, chief of staff at the White House National Security Council, was tasked with creating a working group with different government agencies to look at ways to increase aid into Gaza.
“[It] was a request for agencies to put everything you got on the table,” the former senior official said. The Pentagon then started looking at options.
Asked for comment, the NSC acknowledged inter-agency discussions on potential policy options.
“Because of this work, we were able to advance the delivery of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, utilising every tool possible,” said Adrienne Watson, an NSC spokesperson.
When the head of the military’s Central Command, General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, initially briefed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about the pier mission, his first proposal included a limited number of US troops on the ground, temporarily, to attach the pier to the shore, the former official said.
Austin was aware that the White House was opposed to deploying US forces to Gaza and asked Kurilla to go back and rework it, a current US official and the former official said.
Kurilla created a plan to train Israeli forces to do the installation of the pier on the shore, the former official added. Israeli forces later carried out the plan. The Israeli prime minister’s office and defense ministry referred Reuters’ questions about the pier to the US military.
Kurilla’s Central Command declined to comment on the record. A US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied the account and said “boots on the ground was never a consideration.”
Current and former officials described Central Command as extremely confident the pier project would succeed.
“CENTCOM and General Kurilla, from Day 1, they were consistent in saying: ‘We can do this,'” the former US official said.
The first turn of bad luck came on 11th April, when a fire broke out in the engine room of the USNS 2nd Lt John P Bobo, a Navy ship transporting part of the pier system to the Mediterranean.
The crew put out the fire but the ship had to turn back to the United States.
A soldier stands at Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, near the Gaza coast, on 25th June, 2024. PICTURE: Reuters/Amir Cohen/File photo
Weather was an even bigger problem.
An early warning of the challenges from rough seas came last summer, when US troops attempted to install the pier on an Australian shore during a military exercise.
The sea was too rough, a military officer who directly worked on the pier exercise told Reuters.
In the end, the soldiers couldn’t connect the pier to the beach itself, and instead brought supplies ashore using boats to bridge the gap between the end of the floating pier and the beach.
US officials acknowledge that the Mediterranean weather was a worry. But they were unprepared for how bad the sea conditions turned out to be.
“The forecast that they had [was] basically that the sea state was going to be three or less up until around September,” said one senior US defence official, referring to sea state three, when waves do not exceed three feet.
Instead, waves broke the pier just nine days after it became operational on 16th May. The damage was so bad that it had to be moved to the Israeli port of Ashdod for repairs.
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The incident would be prove the norm, with bad weather keeping the pier inoperative for all but 20 days – half as long as it took to bring the system across the sea to Gaza.
While there were no deaths or known direct attacks on the pier, three US troops suffered non-combat injuries in support of the pier in May, with one medically evacuated in critical condition.
Delivering the food, shelter and medical care that was brought onshore through the pier also proved harder than expected.
The US military aimed to ramp up to as many as 150 trucks a day of aid coming off the pier.
But because the pier was only operational for a total of 20 days, the military says it moved a total of only 19.4 million pounds of aid into Gaza. That would be about 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the pier, based on estimates by the World Food Programme from earlier this year of weight carried by a truck.
The United Nations says about 500 truckloads of aid are needed daily to address the needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Just days after the first shipments of aid rolled off the pier in Gaza, crowds overwhelmed trucks and took some of it.
Israel’s killings of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near the pier as it staged a hostage rescue recovery mission in June also dented the confidence of aid organisations, on whom the US was relying to carry the supplies from the shore and distribute to residents.
A senior US defence official acknowledged that aid delivery “proved to be perhaps more challenging than the planners anticipated”.
An American boat carrying American soldiers and journalist sails near the Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, near the Gaza coast, on 25th June, 2024. PICTURE: Reuters/Amir Cohen/File photo
One former official said Kurilla had raised distribution as a concern early on.
“General Kurilla was also very clear about that: ‘I can do my piece of this, and I can do distribution if you task me to do it,'” the former official said.
“But that was explicitly scoped out of what the task was. And so we were reliant on these international organisations.”
Current and former US officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid organisations themselves were always cool to the pier.
At a closed-door meeting of US officials and aid organisations in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the UN humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden’s pier project.
But Kaag stressed the UN preference was for “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the discussions.
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The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It referred to a briefing on Monday where a spokesperson for the organisation said that the UN appreciated every way of getting aid into Gaza, including the pier, but more access through land routes is needed.
The underlying concern for aid organisations was that Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats over Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, was pushing a solution that would at best be a temporary fix and at worst would take pressure off Netanyahu’s government to open up land routes into Gaza.
Dave Harden, a former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza, described the pier project as “humanitarian theatre”.
“It did relieve the pressure, unfortunately, on having the [land border] crossings work more effectively.”
