The decision “is not made lightly but is necessary to ensure the temporary pier can continue to deliver aid in the future”, the US Central Command said in a post on social media, stating that the pier would be towed to Israel. Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokesperson, said on Monday the pier could be reattached and aid deliveries might be resumed later this week.
The pier “is not working, at least not for Palestinians”, Stephen Semler, a co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, wrote in an essay for the Quincy Institute think tank. Semler argued that the pier had succeeded only in providing “humanitarian cover” for the Biden administration’s policy of supporting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
US officials say that in addition to delivering aid with many of the land routes closed, the pier also threw a spotlight on the urgent need to provide more humanitarian assistance overall to Gaza. But the project’s challenges have frustrated and disappointed top Biden administration officials.
Despite the weather-related delays and other problems, there has been one bright spot: the pier has not yet been hit in an attack.
On the days that the pier has been in working order, it enabled the delivery of thousands of tonnes of aid to Gaza, officials say.
Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, the US Central Command deputy commander, has said the issues with the pier “stemmed solely from unanticipated weather”.
Usually, spring and early summer on the shores of Gaza are calmer. “Plan on X, and nature sends 2X,” said Paul Eaton, a retired major general who was in Somalia in 1993 when the US military put a pier in place there to deliver humanitarian aid to civilians caught in war.
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Several congressional Republicans have criticised the project for its cost and potential risk to US troops.
“This irresponsible and expensive experiment defies all logic except the obvious political explanation: to appease the president’s far-left flank,” Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said earlier this month.
Aid workers say the deliveries of food and other supplies have been slowed by bottlenecks for shipments at border crossings caused by lengthy inspections of trucks, limited operating hours and protests by Israelis.
Israel has argued that there are no limits on the amount of aid it allows to enter. It regularly blames disorganised aid groups – as well as theft by Hamas – for failure to deliver food to Palestinians efficiently.
Central Command said on Friday that 3100 tonnes of aid had been delivered to shore using the pier since the operation started on May 17, with about 2250 tonnes delivered since the pier was re-anchored and resumed operations on June 8.
Much of the aid that makes it through is not reaching Palestinians, aid groups say, because of the logistical and security issues, and looting.
Aid workers say the equivalent of only seven truckloads of assistance is arriving in Gaza via the pier each day, far short of the goal of eventually ramping up to 150 trucks a day.
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“The volume is negligible,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Centre at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. “And the seas are just going to get rougher and rougher.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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