The U.S. military will soon cease humanitarian operations via the pier it built in the Mediterranean Sea off Gaza’s coast to provide another way to get much-needed aid into the strip.
Since becoming operational in May, the pier has been one of the most utilized ways to get aid into Gaza, even though it has been taken offline several times due to inclement weather in the area.
“I do anticipate, in relatively short order, we will wind down pier operations” in Gaza, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Thursday on the sideline of the NATO Summit. Similarly, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said in a statement shortly after Sullivan’s remarks that “the pier will soon cease operations, with more details on that process and timing available in the coming days.”
The pier is offline as of Thursday, and U.S. Central Command personnel failed to re-anchor the pier Wednesday “due to technical and weather-related issues,” Ryder said in a statement.
He noted that the military had not come up with a new date for the pier to be re-anchored. After the pier sustained damages at the beginning of the mission, the military decided it would preemptively disable the pier ahead of inclement weather to ensure it would not be damaged as it had been the first time. Service members detach the pier and bring it to Ashdod, Israel, during the times its not operational.
“The pier and support vessels and equipment are returning to Ashdod where they will remain until further notice,” Ryder said.
The pier was always designed to be temporary, as the weather conditions around the Mediterranean Sea would no longer be ideal for this mission by the end of the summer, U.S. officials have said.
“Historically speaking, the time between May and August, there’s very favorable weather in this part of the world,” Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of CENTCOM, told reporters in May. “We’ll see what that looks like going forward.”
Despite the frequent hiccups, the international community has been able to transport millions of pounds of aid through it when it has been operational.
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“To date, more than 8,100 metric tons (nearly 20 million pounds) of humanitarian aid have been delivered from the pier to the marshaling area where it can be collected by humanitarian organizations for onward delivery and distribution,” Ryder added. “This represents the largest amount of aid transported by the U.S. military over a 3-month period and the largest humanitarian response in the Middle East region.”
No U.S. service members are in Gaza for this mission or are involved in the distribution of the aid the military brings to Gaza’s shores throughout the enclave, which has been a significant problem over the course of this mission. The United Nations and World Food Programme are largely responsible for distribution, though the contours of Israel’s war against Hamas have made their jobs very dangerous.
