End of the Road for $230 Million Gaza Pier

The Biden administration’s $230 million Gaza pier, which took months to build and only operated for about 25 days, is being quietly shut down and moved to the Ashdod corridor.  Pier Operations In May, supplies began flowing into Gaza through...

The post End of the Road for $230 Million Gaza Pier appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Biden administration’s $230 million Gaza pier, which took months to build and only operated for about 25 days, is being quietly shut down and moved to the Ashdod corridor. 

Pier Operations

In May, supplies began flowing into Gaza through the pier via Cyprus. Since then, it has delivered the greatest volume of humanitarian aid, nearly 20 million pounds, into the Middle East. (READ MORE: Hezbollah Sets Its Sights on Cyprus)

After supplies arrive in Cyprus they are inspected and shipped to a floating platform near the Gaza pier. There, they are loaded onto smaller ships using trucks that then offload onto the floating pier where they disembark onto the shore and go through a second inspection by Israeli forces. Aid is then distributed by humanitarian aid groups or sent to warehouses.  

Supplies to feed 450,000 people for one month have flowed off the pier. About 2 million people live in Gaza.

The Pier Underperformed

The pier faced numerous issues throughout the entire operation which have severely limited operations.

One-thousand U.S. soldiers and sailors living on boats off the shore of Gaza have struggled to keep the pier operational. Bad weather and seas delayed the installment of the pier and broke pieces of it, further delaying operations. Weather and choppy seas also forced U.S. soldiers to detach the pier from the shore in Gaza, move it to a safer area, and then reattach it numerous times.

The pier hasn’t been in use since June 28 because of bad seas. It was moved to Ashdod, an Israeli port to the north of Gaza, where it has stayed.

Security concerns have also plagued the pier. Aid groups became reluctant to distribute supplies brought in through it after the death of several aid workers.

Armed Palestinian looters have attacked aid trucks, Israeli airstrikes have hit aid workers, and Israeli troops use a small area near the pier for military operations. Israel has also accused Hamas of stealing the aid.

Reluctance to distribute the food has led to pile-ups of supplies, forcing the World Food Program to hire contractors to move the aid to warehouses to prevent it from spoiling.

Future Plans for the Gaza Pier

The pier is an unprecedented operation and officials are split over its success. Some have defended the mission because it achieved its objective of lessening the humanitarian crisis and increasing aid flow. Others have called it a waste of resources and said it needlessly put American lives in danger. 

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referred The American Spectator to a statement on X saying “They are sending U.S. servicemembers into Hamas’s crosshairs to build a pier — so they can cater to the Hamas wing of the Democrat Party.” 

Now that the pier is being dismantled, aid will still come in from Cyprus, but it will exclusively be sent to the Ashdod corridor and distributed on land. During a Pentagon press conference, U.S. officials expressed that Ashdod would be a more sustainable option for getting aid into Gaza. One million pounds of supplies have already been distributed through the corridor and 5 million additional pounds are in Cyprus, waiting to be distributed. 

The post End of the Road for $230 Million Gaza Pier appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.