US aid efforts for Gaza have suffered an embarrassing setback after the temporary pier built by the military broke apart in heavy seas, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
The $320m pier was intended to provide a crucial supply line for aid deliveries by sea to reach starving Palestinians and alleviate a humanitarian catastrophe. Now the effort is on hold for at least a week.
Sabrina Singh, the deputy press secretary for the defence department, told reporters that high seas and a north African weather system had caused a section of the pier to break away on Tuesday morning.
The pier will be pulled out and sent to the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, where US Central Command (Centcom) will repair it.
“The rebuilding and repairing of the pier will take at least over a week, and, following completion, will need to be re-anchored to the coast of Gaza,” Singh said.
“Thus, upon completion of the pier repair and reassembly, the intention is to re-anchor the temporary pier to the coast of Gaza and resume humanitarian aid to the people who need it most.”
The White House insisted that the pier is still viable as a supplement to aid routes. John Kirby, a spokesperson for the national security council, told reporters: “It was never intended to supplant what you can do on the ground through trucks and getting those crossings open.
“We said that from the get-go. We also said it’s going to be tough. It’s been tough. Weather plays a role. Mother Nature has a say here and the eastern Med, even in the summertime, can be a pretty rough place and that’s what’s happening right now.”
But Kirby added: “Can it be a force multiplier? Can it add to? Absolutely, and I think they’ve so far gotten more than a thousand metric tons in just off the temporary pier alone which, considering the weather, considering the complexity of doing it that way – the multi-node stop you have to do to move from ship to pier to truck to ground – that’s still an impressive record so far.”
The damage is the latest setback to the pier, which opened two weeks ago, and is likely to be seized on by Joe Biden’s critics as a waste of taxpayer money.
Centcom said on Saturday that four US army vessels supporting the pier broke free from their moorings and ran aground in heavy seas. Two beached in Gaza while the other two washed up on the coast of Israel, 30 miles south of Tel Aviv. One has been recovered and the other three will be brought back in within 48 hours, Singh said.
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Biden had said in March that the pier would be built to alleviate restrictions imposed by Israel on aid delivery by land to Gaza. Israel has imposed a siege on Gaza that has deprived the territory’s 2.4 million people of most clean water, food, medicines and fuel.
Centcom said 1,005 metric tons of aid had been delivered from the sea to the beach transfer point as of Friday, with 903 metric tons distributed from the transfer point to the UN warehouse.
Gaza is suffering its bloodiest war, which broke out after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,800 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry.