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The US military is nearing completion of a $320mn floating pier off Gaza, a complex project to allow seaborne humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave where the reliable land routes have for months been disrupted by politics and war.
Hundreds of US troops have spent weeks building the structure that aims to allay the dire humanitarian crisis in the strip, with US naval vessels ferrying specialised equipment to a point about two miles offshore where the aid ships from Cyprus are supposed to dock.
From there, a fleet of smaller craft will take the goods to a site on the Gaza shore, where 70 acres of land have been cleared by the Israeli military. The Pentagon estimates that the initiative has already cost $320mn. Test runs on the pier — called the Joint Logistics Over the Shore, or JLOTS — could begin this month, and it is only expected to operate until the autumn, when the weather changes, according to two people familiar with the project.
The project that was promised by US President Joe Biden in early March is aimed at bypassing some of the hurdles that Israeli politics and bureaucracy have created in getting enough aid into the territory to rescue Gaza from the precipice of a famine.
But the necessity of such a complex and costly effort to transport aid 250 miles from the Mediterranean island remains in question. Gaza has several border crossings from which the enclave could be “flooded with aid”, as US officials have repeatedly said they want.
Israel has made strides to open additional overland routes into Gaza, and this week announced the reopening of the Erez crossing to facilitate the entry of aid. Two other additional entry points into Gaza have also recently been created by the Israeli military.
But international aid groups warn that the JLOTS plan could divert attention from these more efficient land routes and, in any event, would not resolve the more serious problem of damaged roads and lawlessness that has hampered distribution inside the enclave.
“It’s a wasteful distraction,” a senior UN official, who requested anonymity, said of the new pier. “There are roads, there are border crossings — there’s [already] aid waiting outside Gaza.”
Humanitarian groups and the US agree that transporting goods into Gaza by truck is the best way to ensure that Palestinian civilians receive the thousands of tonnes of aid that the UN and other international bodies have purchased.
The UN said in March that all of Gaza was on the verge of a man-made famine and that starvation was spreading through the northern half of the enclave.
Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military, made clear that the pier would not aim to replace other routes, but would be “in addition . . . and it will allow a faster route into north Gaza”.
Convincing Israel to streamline and facilitate the transfer of more aid into Gaza has become an international diplomatic endeavour. It took weeks of US pressure for Israel to finally allow flour shipments and other aid to transit via its Ashdod port.
Even now, the UN and other agencies complain of an inadequate number of scanners at Israeli security checks, arbitrary refusals of several trucks and inadequate safety on the main roads within Gaza for aid trucks to travel.
The aid destined for the US pier will be inspected by Israel in Cyprus itself, with US officials hoping that it will speed up deliveries once the assistance “hits the beach” in Gaza. Israeli inspections at land borders have been a recurring bottleneck, the UN and other aid agencies have said.
A sizeable portion of Israel’s right wing opposes the delivery of aid to Gazan civilians until Hamas releases the hostages it still holds, and police have done little to break up periodic protests along the route that trucks would have to take.
At full capacity, the pier and its adjoining infrastructure may be able to handle the equivalent of about 150 trucks of aid per day, a US official told reporters last week.
Before the war, Gaza received about 500 trucks of aid per day, which has fallen to about 200 per day over the past six months. Israeli officials insist that the number of trucks entering Gaza in the past two weeks has often surpassed 400 per day, a figure the UN disputes.
The UN estimates that Gaza needs as many as 1,000 trucks of aid per day for several weeks to overcome the deep shortage of food, medicine and other critical supplies that has built up over the past few months.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken acknowledged on a visit to Israel this week that there had been some improvements in aid provision, but that more still had to be done.
“The progress is real but given the need, given the immense need in Gaza, it needs to be accelerated, it needs to be sustained,” he said.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
