Four vessels, part of the US-built pier stretching from Gaza thousands of feet into the Mediterranean Sea, have broken off and washed ashore. In early March, Joe Biden used his platform at the State of the Union to order the military to create a sea route to bring aid to the starving Palestinians. Nearly three months later, the pier has faced a series of cost overruns, injuries, and other setbacks.
On Saturday morning, rough seas broke off four vessels that appear to be serving as part of the pier. “The vessels broke free from their moorings and two vessels are now anchored on the beach near the pier. The third and fourth vessels are beached on the coast of Israel near Ashkelon. Efforts to recover the vessels are underway with assistance from the Israeli Navy,” a statement from US Central Command (CENTCOM) explained.
The Pentagon claims no US soldiers will enter Gaza to recover the pieces of the pier, and the Israeli military is helping to recover the four vessels. The Department of Defense said no one was injured in the incident and the pier is still functional.
Since Biden announced the pier, whose cost has doubled, has resulted in three US soldiers being injured and very little aid entering Gaza. The US hopes that 150 trucks of aid will enter Gaza each day through the pier. However, during the first week of operations only 21 trucks of assistance reached the Strip through the pier. 41 trucks were reported to have delivered food by the May 23.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the process the aid must go through to enter Gaza via the sea route has a series of potential pitfalls. In Cyprus, the aid “is screened and packaged onto shipping pallets. A large military or commercial ship then transports the pallets some 200 miles across the Mediterranean Sea to a floating platform built by the US,” the writers explained.
“There, the pallets are put into trucks, which are driven onto smaller military vessels that carry them about 6 miles to a floating US-built causeway secured to the beach by Israeli army engineers.” The WSJ adds, “The trucks drive a few hundred feet down the causeway and onto the beach. In a zone protected by Israeli soldiers, aid workers transfer the pallets onto a separate fleet of trucks that are used by aid groups to complete the final leg to warehouses and distribution points inside Gaza.”
The trucks that do make it to Gaza have faced restrictions placed by the Israeli military and starving Palestinians attempting to loot the trucks.
The lack of aid reaching Gaza is not the only problem the pier has encountered. On Thursday, the Pentagon reported three US soldiers suffered non-combat injuries. Additionally, Biden has been criticized by human rights groups for choosing to set up a complex sea route when he could pressure Israel to allow more aid into Gaza by land, a far faster method.
Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson of UN chief Antonio Guterres, said that the World Food Program explained, “What we want to see, as we’ve been saying, is massive aid coming in through land routes.”
The pier’s latest failure comes as nearly all 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are struggling to find anything to eat, with many already suffering in famine conditions. Several aid distribution agencies in Gaza have shut down over a lack of supplies caused by Israeli military operations.
Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.
Is starving the poor people of Gaza a US plan?….
Yes it is…!
Whatever Israel wants is the U.S.’s Zionist President’s Plan. Lots of dead Palestinian women & kids. Biden very generous in providing two & five thousand pound bombs to decimate whole neighborhoods. What a guy!!! Not sayin Trump would be any better, perhaps worse. Seems most of our politicians are bought & paid for with the billions that bought & paid Congress critters gift them to carry on with their ethnic cleansing genocide. It will be very revealing how this IJC jufgement works, or does not work. The fix is in, but will it prevail…???????? Or will the long arm of law somehow snag Netanyahu & crew????
I do not place any faith in a largely discreited ICC. This court ftom it inception was only for those West found not compliant enough, or wanted to embarrass anyone, preventing them from traveling, etc.
ICC superficiality in evidence gathering is astounding. They rely on media and politically motivated bodies to provide “evidence”. The only reasin it indicted Netanyahu and Galant is to salvage its reputation globaly. Yes, it sounds bad for Netanyahu, but nobody will take it seriously. This is why in US a handful of senators sent the letter to ICC , saying “You have been warned. ..”.
ICJ cannot be brushed off just like that. This is UN organ. Its decision is binding. All members have to comply. Especially when a court is investigating evidence under Genocide Convention, when the obligations of prevention apply to members as well.
The ardurous process is just starting. We will most likely see the fallout in UN SC. Given the charges under Genocide Convention, the prevention obligation will hamstring US range of options in attempting to shield Israel.
US is already skirting on thin ice when State Delartment spokesperson desribed Israeli leadership calls for genocide as “rhetoric”. Words have consequences, something made quite clear in Nuremberg proceedings.
Hope after this ruling various spokespeople and politicians may want to be more careful about what they find acceptable “rhetoric”.
Looks like. Any other explanation? If US really wanted food and medicine in —Israel would have been told in no uncertain terms the consequences of the refusal to comply. US need not humor Israeli — to inspect the aid it provides. US could even break off diolomatic relations and impose its will, How can we stand the humiliation of Israel forbidding anesthetics or pain medication? Has this prohibition been eliminated?
US can, as a member of Security Council order Israel to comply with ICJ’s order. Which includes the order to cease any military or non-military acrivity in Rafah region, and to open Rafah crossing to let aid come in. Ordering other crossings opened as well. Court ordered unhindered access to Gaza to the Court officials and any other UN investigating bodies for the lurposes of investigating the evidence of genocide. US has the power to see to it that court orders are complied with. UN and US very authority is at stake.
Still not altogether clear about the purpose of the pier. The projected and actual delivery capacity may be just the result of teething problems.
But the damage to the pier due to storms is less clear. People have been sailing Mediterranean for thousands of years and conditions are well known.
The purpose of the pier is to pretend that the US actually gives a rip about the Palestinians and is trying to alleviate their suffering when in fact….. It is pure PR.
Yes, it was a PR project from the get-go. And if people here are sufficiently distracted to criticize its construction, it has done its job.
It was never about delivering aid, because that would be contrary to Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan to drive all Palestinians into exile. Or death.
Back in Oct., Professor Norman Finkelstein, in an interview by Chris Hedges, said that the Israeli plan is to kill as many as possible, by any means, then driving the rest into the Sinai desert to die.
Starving the Gazans is the Israeli plan. The US is just giving that project a passive assist by constructing a causeway to nowhere. To give starvation a happy face. And feed the military-industrial complex.
$320 million!!!!
A mere drop in our bucket of blood. 🔴
Must be Made in USA…. Not China…!
This smells set up
Nope. It’s just another example of incompetence in the US military I’m afraid.
… and corruption.
Another insight into how incompetent the US military is these days.
In this case, engineering & logistics incompetence – anchoring a floating pier in sand, with volatile surf conditions and strong tides, was always a stupid idea.
It seems that the engineers & logistics teams have badly botched the construction, failing to take into account the stresses on the structure caused by natural elements, plus the friction causes by docking, unloading, loading, not to mention the weights and loads of different vehicles driving on and off the structure, and sitting idly on it.
It also seems that any monitoring of the stresses on the structure has been extremely poor (more likely non-existent).
Effective military engineers have been solving these problems for millenia. Until ~2012, this would have been a no brainer US military. Not any more.
The only thing the military is good at is wholesale death and destruction, and military ‘engineers’ specialize in the latter. They’re not even “pretty good half-ass” engineers. They face no liability and no accounting.
“[Despite failures and] little aid entering Gaza…the US hopes that 150 trucks of aid will enter Gaza each day through the pier.”
Before press, Nat’l Security Coordinator John Kirby chokes up, defends US plan to outflank Israel humanitarian blockade as “aspirational.”
He’s an incredible bald faced liar.
Did Israel sabotage this FAKE Pier, intended to help Palestinians? When has the USA ever helped Palestinians or any Arab Country? This was just a STALL and KILL Campaign and this is more of the same.
A ***** stupidity is another possibility.
Incompetence on the part of the Corps of Engineers of the U.S. of A. , or, a nice delaying tactic to aid Israel in the genocide of the Palestinians. Aid by land routes would be coming in, if, Mr. Biden says so, and uses U.S. forces to assist. So, what do you all think???
Biden is not in charge, he is even too demented to care as long as he gets reelected by voters who are as demented as he is. No telling if he has enough light to know if he won.
Too much experience in bombing people with efficiency, not nearly enough in feeding or helping them. Lack of massive experience…
The stupidity of the Biden administration is astounding.
On another note, this doesn’t bode well for the “upcoming” U.S. navy’s war against China.
Why do we need to build a pier in the first place? Doesn’t “Great Ally” have control over the Gaza border? Why won’t “Great Ally” allow the US to bring in humanitarian aid by land?
If it were not so sad it would be funny, they can’t even build a pier able to withstand a little rough water.
Incompetence is a great excuse for anything.
If it wasn’t intentional (which I won’t completely rule out with Biden’s faux “I’m trying so hard” bullshit, over and over, resulting in intentional failure), it is a large scale deadly boondoggle.
Anyone with half a brain and humanity would demand emergency road entrance of food with US military protection. But alas, brains and empathy are in even shorter supply than food aid.
USS Joey Biden: A rudderless ship run aground by a senile Captain with no navigational skills.
Who is the crew? A ship of fools!
Lol, really an apt metaphor for the state of US Power – Broken, Dysfunctional, and anchored to the Zionist state of Israel and the War Criminals that run it.
They are even incompetent conmen.
As I’ve said, this was never an aid project. It was a combination of: 1) PR to help Biden’s election effort by bamboozling the easily bamboolzed US electorate that Biden was actually trying to help, and 2) in reality a military project to provide logistical assistance and US troops to Israel once Israel invades Lebanon and Hezbollah has taken out the Israeli airfields and ports previously used to supply Israel with weapons.
The fact that it’s falling apart does demonstrate the boondoggle nature of the project, as well as US military incompetence, but I’m sure the military will correct the issue, simply because they’re not going anywhere. This is a permanent US military presence in Israel, along with those pre-established US military logistics bases already in Israel, from which the US has been supplying Israel in concert with airlifted logistics.
A waste of money.