WASHINGTON (AP) — A dock built by the U.S. military to transport humanitarian aid to Gaza will be dismantled and sent home, ending a mission that was fraught with danger. Frequent weather and security issues This has limited the amount of food and other supplies that can reach starving Palestinians.
The pier had its intended effect in what he called an “unprecedented operation,” U.S. Central Command Deputy Commander Adm. Brad Cooper told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday.
With the US military moving away from the sea route for humanitarian aid, questions are swirling about a new Israeli plan to use the port of Ashdod as an alternative. There are few details about how the plan would work, and there are ongoing concerns about whether aid groups will have enough viable land crossings to deliver aid to territory blockaded by Israel. The war between Israel and Hamas.
The Ashdod corridor will be more sustainable, Cooper said, and has already been used to deliver more than a million pounds of aid to Gaza.
“Having successfully delivered the largest amount of humanitarian aid ever to the Middle East, we have completed our mission and are moving into a new phase. In the coming weeks, we expect millions of pounds of aid to enter Gaza via this new route,” Cooper said.
He said there was currently £5 million of aid in Cyprus, waiting to cross into Ashdod, with deliveries expected to start “in the coming days”.
“Ashdod will be a very vital and important route into Gaza,” Sonali Korde, assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Humanitarian Assistance, told reporters.
But she said, “The main challenge we face now in Gaza is the insecurity and lawlessness that impedes the distribution of aid once it reaches Gaza and the crossing points.”
Israel controls all of the Gaza Strip’s border crossings, most of which are open.
Critics describe the pier as a $230 million failed project that failed to provide the level of aid needed to stop the impending famine. However, the U.S. military has confirmed that it has not repaired it. It was the best hope. The aid was arriving only during a critical period of near-total famine in Gaza, and it received nearly 20 million pounds (9 million kilograms) of desperately needed supplies.
President Joe Biden, who announced the pier’s construction during his State of the Union address in March, said, Disappointment on the sidewalk saying“I was hoping it would be more successful.”
The project was intended as a temporary solution to deliver aid to starving Palestinians, and it was criticized from the start by aid groups who denounced it as a waste of time and money. While U.S. defense officials acknowledged that the weather was worse than expected and specified the days on which the pier could operate, they also expressed frustration with the Human groups are unable and unwilling to To distribute aid that has arrived through the system, only for it to pile up on the beach.
But there is a crucial element that neither aid groups nor the U.S. military have been able to control: the Israeli Defense Forces, whose military operation in Gaza has put humanitarian workers at constant risk, and in a number of cases, death. cost them their lives.
As a result, the platform was operational for less than 25 days after it was installed on May 16, and aid agencies used it for only about half that time due to security concerns.
Stuck in the middle were more than a thousand American soldiers and sailors who had been living largely on boats off the coast of Gaza and struggled to keep the dock running but spent days repairing, detaching, moving and reinstalling it due to bad weather.
Cooper declined to provide any details on how or when the troops would return home.
Tensions continued until the last minute, with senior Biden administration officials signaling the end of the pier project days ago, but U.S. Central Command balking. Holding out hope that the military can re-establish it. One last time to transfer any final shipments of aid to shore.
Most agree that the use of the sea route and what is known as the Army’s Joint Logistics Operations across the Coast, or JLOTS, did not live up to early expectations. Even at the outset, officials warned of challenges because the sea was shallow, the weather was unpredictable and the area was an active war zone.
The United States also had to train Israeli and other forces on how to connect the pier to the shore because no American soldier could set foot on Gaza soil, a situation Biden has faced since the start of the conflict between Hamas and Israel in October.
Still, enough aid has flowed through the dock to feed 450,000 people for a month, according to USAID, which has coordinated with the United Nations and others to get supplies to those in need. Humanitarian leaders say the dock operation has laid the groundwork for a coordination system with the Israeli government and military that they can expand.
The only place he managed to avoid a clash with the Israeli army was on the sidewalk, which began operating at a time of extreme desperation and food shortages, according to the USAID director. Samantha Power She said Israel and the army had now agreed to expand the coordination plan to include “the entire Gaza Strip.”
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday that a new Pier 28 will soon be built at the Israeli port of Ashdod to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip as an alternative to the one built by the U.S. military. He did not say when it would start operating.
But other aid groups have criticized the U.S. military pier as a distraction, and said the United States should instead be pressing Israel to open more land crossings and allow aid to flow through them faster and more efficiently.
Everyone agreed from the beginning that land crossings were the most productive way to get aid into Gaza, but the Israeli military routinely prevents Dead ends and slow connections Because of the inspections. Aid groups have also been terrorized by Hamas attacks. Armed men looted supply convoys. More than 278 workers have been killed in the conflict, Bauer said.
As the Pentagon and the military evaluate the pier’s performance, questions will be raised about whether officials underestimated the ongoing weather challenges and security hurdles that hampered the operation.
The system is operated by the Army’s 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary) at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia. It’s like a giant Lego system — a set of 40-foot (12-meter) steel pieces that can be locked together to form a sidewalk and a walkway.
Nine days after the pier was installed on the Gaza coast, bad weather conditions damaged it, forcing the forces to dismantle it and transport it to the Israeli port of Ashdod for more than two weeks for repairs. Weather conditions forced the forces to separate the pier from the shore twice more and transport it to Ashdod. It was separated for the final time on June 28.
Aid groups struggled to distribute supplies from the dock to Gaza, and their efforts came to an abrupt halt after an Israeli military raid on June 8 that rescued four hostages but killed hundreds of Palestinians.
The forces used an area near the pier to land a helicopter and extract the hostages. Having a small part of the Israeli military operation so close to the pier creates problems for aid organizations that rely on independence and separation from the forces to remain safe.
As a result, the United Nations suspended all aid deliveries by the World Food Programme while it conducted an undisclosed review. WFP staff have not distributed aid from the pier since then, but have hired contractors to move the aid that has piled up on the beach to warehouses so it does not spoil.
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