A floating pier built by the US military for seaborne humanitarian deliveries to Gaza has proved itself to be fragile in the face of rougher seas than expected, and the future of the whole $230m project is now in question.
The pier has been usable for just 12 days since it began operations on 17 May. On most of those days the assistance arriving by sea has had to be left on the beach as there have been no trucks to distribute it to warehouses in Gaza, because of lack of security.
The scheme has fallen far short of initial expectations. When he announced it in his state of the union speech on 7 March, Joe Biden said the temporary pier “would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day”.
It took more than two months to put together the two structures required, a floating dock anchored a few miles out to sea and a floating pier to be attached to the Gazan coast. About 1,000 soldiers and sailors and a small flotilla of ships were involved in the construction, including a Royal Navy landing ship, Cardigan Bay, which provided accommodation.
Over the entire course of the pier’s operation so far, however, only about 250 truckloads of food and other humanitarian assistance (4,100 tonnes) have arrived by the planned maritime corridor, less than half of what would cross into Gaza in a single day before the war. Much of the aid that has arrived so far is stuck at the foot of the pier on a marshalling yard established on the beach.
Since 274 Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces in the course of a hostage rescue mission on 8 June, the World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended the convoys that were supposed to take pallets of aids from the marshalling yard to warehouses and then to the 2.3 million people of Gaza under bombardment and facing famine. The WFP says its security review is still in progress.
The seas in the eastern Mediterranean have been choppier than expected and the pier (known by the US military as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, JLOTS) has been less robust than the Pentagon planners predicted. The JLOTS floating structure is designed to work in conditions up to “sea state 3”, defined by waves of 0.5 to 1.25 metres. It was hoped it would endure through the spring and summer until September, but it was badly damaged in a storm on 25 May, and the sea has been unseasonably choppy since then.
After repairs at the Israeli port of Ashdod, it came back into operation on 8 June but lasted a day before deliveries were suspended for another two days. On 14 June the pier was dismantled and towed to Ashdod again as a precaution against stormy seas.
It was put back in place on Wednesday and since then has been used to offload about 4,160 tonnes of aid, but there have been reports that, because of its vulnerability to weather and high seas, it could be dismantled once and for all ahead of schedule, as early as next month.
“They just miscalculated,” Stephen Morrison, a senior vice-president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “They didn’t fully understand what was going to happen with the weather … So the DoD [Department of Defence] walks away, humiliated in a fashion.”
The Pentagon admits the challenges the JLOTS plan is facing but denies that a decision has already been taken to take it down early.
“We have not established an end date for this mission as of now, contrary to some press reporting on the matter,” the chief spokesperson Maj Gen Patrick Ryder, said on Thursday.
The pier was intended as a means of getting aid ashore independently of Israel to the besieged and devastated coastal strip, after the Biden administration became frustrated with the lack of access for relief supplies through land crossings.
Most aid workers involved in the Gaza emergency effort say that any relief is better than none but they voice concerns that the spectacular, expensive effort has distracted energy and attention from political pressure on Israel to open the land crossings fully to trucks, by far the most effective means of delivering food.
Ziad Issa, the head of policy and research at the British charity Action Aid, said that the amount of humanitarian aid arriving in Gaza had dropped to fewer than 100 trucks a day on average in the first half of June.
Hardly any assistance is being distributed around the strip because of the appalling security conditions. The main access point from Egypt, the Rafah crossing, has been closed since it was captured by the IDF on 7 May, at the start of a major offensive on Rafah city. Some trucks have been diverted to the Keren Shalom gate in southern Israel, but the roads leading into Gaza from Keren Shalom have proved extremely dangerous.
“It’s unsafe for aid workers and trucks to move because of the ongoing bombardments on Gaza,” Issa said. The IDF declared a “tactical pause” last Sunday to allow an aid corridor through southern Gaza, but Issa said: “We haven’t seen any difference since these tactical pauses have come in place.”
The IDF is not the only threat to aid delivery. Aid trucks driving through Gaza have been repeatedly held up by armed gangs, who are increasingly powerful in the ruined streets of Gaza’s cities as the war goes on.
The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, relied on Palestinian police for the security of its aid convoys, but the police were treated by the IDF as an arm of Hamas and therefore legitimate targets. In their absence, there is a security vacuum.
The Israeli government also refuses to deal with Unrwa, which is by far the biggest relief agency in Gaza. In its place, the US government persuaded the WFP to distribute food arriving by the pier. The WFP did not respond to a query on when it might resume road convoys to and from the pier.
“They were sort of pushed to the front of the stage by the US to be the partner on the ground,” Morrison said. “They were very uneasy and very reluctant … They just didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of this craziness and the security on the ground is horrible.”
“We are deeply grateful for the UN’s work to get assistance to the people of Gaza in this increasingly volatile and dangerous environment and appreciate their dedication to ensuring the safety of their staff and those they aim to reach with assistance,” a spokesperson for the US Agency for International Development said.
“We continue to press the Israeli government to facilitate the transport of aid shipments by land and sea, accelerate inspections, open up all avenues of access, and facilitate safe movements of aid convoys within Gaza so humanitarians can get aid directly and effectively to those who need it throughout Gaza.”
Given all the problems at the land crossings, the Biden administration is reluctant to give up entirely on the JLOTS pier. “With need in Gaza growing as well as the extreme insecurity that is making onward distribution from Keren Shalom in particular incredibly difficult for humanitarian organisations, the maritime pier is a critical additional conduit for aid deliveries,” a US official said.