The United States has permanently shut down the floating pier it constructed earlier this year to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip, the US military announced* on 17 July, bringing to a premature end an ill-fated $230 million project beset from the start by unrealistic expectations and logistical problems.
Billed as an effort to drastically increase the amount of aid entering the enclave, the temporary pier project was mired in controversy right from the get-go. “It was a boondoggle from start to finish,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, told The New Humanitarian.
The pier had been standing by at the Israeli port of Ashdod after being detached from the Gaza coastline at the end of June. It was supposed to be put back in place to allow aid that is waiting in Cyprus – the logistical staging ground for the project – to be delivered to Gaza, before being permanently shut down.
But now, even that plan has been scrapped, with the operation shifting to Ashdod – although details on the plan to use the Israeli port to deliver aid to Gaza are still scarce.
Facing domestic political pressure over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza, US President Joe Biden announced the project during his marquee annual address, the State of the Union, on 7 March.
“Tonight, I’m directing the US military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters,” Biden said. “A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.”
The US Department of Defense initially said the pier would enable the delivery of up to two million meals per day to Gaza’s population of 2.1 million Palestinians.
However, during its lifespan – a bumpy two months – only 8,000 metric tonnes of aid were delivered via the pier. That is about 600 trucks worth, according to an estimate by the Financial Times – roughly equivalent to the number of trucks humanitarian agencies say need to enter Gaza every day.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), the project’s distribution partner, even struggled to deliver that amount of aid to people in need due to logistical and security challenges that many had foreseen.
“I don’t think there’s been much surprise at all about what a bust it has been,” Konyndyk said of the pier. “And it’s not a surprise at all that it didn't change the game in Gaza, because it wasn’t trying to.”
‘It was just a workaround’
Nine months of Israeli bombardment, ground operations, and siege have plunged the entire population of Gaza into dire food insecurity, and virtually everyone in the enclave is dependent on aid to survive. Around 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced from their homes – many multiple times – and more than 38,500 have been killed, according to health authorities in the enclave.
When the US announced the pier project in March, UN aid officials had already been warning for over a month that they believed pockets of famine existed in the north of Gaza, which had been almost entirely cut off from aid and supplies since Israel launched its military operations in response to Hamas’ deadly 7 October attacks.
“At the time, the biggest obstacle [to a more robust humanitarian response] – and still the biggest obstacle – is the policy of the Israeli government and the conduct of Israeli forces inside Gaza.”
People The New Humanitarian spoke to in the north of Gaza at the end of February and early March said they were eating grass and grinding animal feed into flour to make bread as a last resort.
“Getting a meal of animal feed grains has become a difficult task. It forces me to walk for about four hours in the hope of finding even a kilo of it,” said Hossam Masoud, a 35-year-old from Jabalia in northern Gaza. “I fall to the ground many times because my body has become thin and I am no longer able to walk.”
Cumbersome Israeli security screenings were severely limiting how much aid was able to enter Gaza, and Israel was refusing to open border crossings to allow aid directly into the north. As a result, humanitarian agencies had to truck aid from the Rafah and Kerem Shalom border crossings in the south to an Israeli checkpoint controlling access to the north, where they were sometimes turned back.
Distributing the limited amount of aid that did enter the north was extremely difficult and dangerous because of the absence of a functioning deconfliction process with the Israeli military. The population in the north of Gaza was also desperate, and public order had largely dissolved following months of brutal war.
“At the time, the biggest obstacle [to a more robust humanitarian response] – and still the biggest obstacle – is the policy of the Israeli government and the conduct of Israeli forces inside Gaza,” Konyndyk said.
The Biden administration announced the expensive and logistically complicated pier project to avoid having to put meaningful political pressure on the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to increase aid access, according to Konyndyk.
“It was just a workaround to avoid a political confrontation that would have yielded a much more meaningful change, i.e. opening the north,” he said.
‘Can’t predict the weather’
The US Defense Department initially estimated that it would take up to 60 days to move equipment and personnel into place and assemble the pier. In the end, it took more than 70 before the first aid delivery via the pier was made on 17 May.
Even then, 11 out of the 16 WFP trucks taking the assistance to warehouses in the north for distribution were overrun by desperate Palestinians, who took their contents – an issue that has persisted as security conditions have grown worse in the north of Gaza.
A little over two weeks later, high winds and heavy seas damaged the pier and caused four boats involved in the operation to come unmoored. Two washed ashore in Gaza and two in Israel.
After being fixed and redeployed in early June, the pier has been dismantled, moved, and reassembled multiple times due to sea conditions. Last Wednesday, it was supposed to be put back in place one final time to allow aid that has piled up in Cyprus to be brought ashore in Gaza before the pier is permanently dismantled.
But even that effort didn’t go according to plan: On 12 July, US Department of Defense spokesperson Sabrina Singh said during a press briefing that “technical and weather related issues” had prevented the pier from being re-anchored. When a reporter asked if this was the end of the pier, Singh responded: “Again, can’t predict the weather”.
The end finally came on 17 July when Vice Admiral Brad Cooper of the US military told reporters that the “mission involving the pier is complete”.
Blurred lines
Logistical and weather-related issues, however, are only part of the story. From the beginning, several aid organisations denounced the project. For example, Médecins Sans Frontières called it a “glaring distraction from the real problem: Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate military campaign and punishing siege”.
The project also blurred the lines between humanitarian and military activities in Gaza. “The pier was, from the outset, a hybrid military entity,” Konyndyk said. “It was operated by the US military and the Israeli military. And it abutted to an IDF [Israeli Defence Force] forward operating base.”
In order to create the landing area for the pier and a surrounding security buffer, the Israeli military demolished Palestinian homes that had stood in the area. The New Humanitarian spoke to residents of al-Zahra, the neighbourhood that was ground to dust to make way for the landing area, at the end of April.
A time lapse of demolitions for the pier landing area
“Our feelings are very difficult as we talk about seeing the rubble of our homes being used to build this port, without even taking into consideration our memories and our lives,” said Abdullah Abu al-Hinud, 43, who was forcibly displaced from al-Zahra earlier in the war.
This grey zone between humanitarian and military purposes made aid agencies wary of the reputational and safety risks of getting involved in the project – although WFP did eventually sign on as the delivery partner.
Lines became even more blurred when the Israeli military swept into Nuseirat refugee camp on 8 June in a surprise operation to rescue four Israeli hostages. Afterwards, a video circulated widely on social media showing an Israeli helicopter taking off from a beach with the US aid pier in the background.
A US Defense Department spokesperson said the proximity was “incidental” and that “the pier, the equipment, the personnel all supporting that humanitarian effort had nothing to do with the [Israeli military] rescue operation”.
But the video gave rise to a widespread perception among Palestinians in Gaza that the pier had been used in the operation. At least 274 Palestinians were killed during Israel’s Nuseirat mission, according to Gaza health officials.
WFP temporarily paused its involvement in the pier project afterwards due to safety concerns.
“There is a sort of irony here in that Israel routinely criticises Hamas for conflating military and civilian objects,” Konyndyk said. “And here they are doing the same with the pier.”
Failure foretold
From the beginning, almost no one in the humanitarian sector thought the US plan to deliver aid to Gaza via a temporary pier was workable or that it would make a meaningful difference to the amount of assistance reaching people. “It was only the people who didn’t know humanitarian logistics who thought it would,” Konyndyk said.
Still, “if you're an NGO or an agency that depends heavily on the US government for your funding, that is a very, very hard thing to come out against publicly,” he added.
With the pier’s last days in sight – or maybe already past – the staggering humanitarian suffering in Gaza is only mounting, and the aid response is in disarray.
Due to the Israeli military’s ground offensive in Rafah, the amount of aid entering the enclave is even less now than the already insufficient amounts being allowed in when Biden first announced the project at the beginning of March.
For Konyndyk, the fact that it was clear from the beginning that the pier was not a solution to the issues preventing a meaningful aid response from taking shape in Gaza “shows you how disconnected the policymaking on this was from any kind of humanitarian expertise”.
“This was,” he added, “clearly a political decision.”
(*This story was updated on 17 July 2024 with the official announcement of the end of the project.)
Edited by Andrew Gully.
