U.S.-Built Pier in Gaza Nears Opening, but Distributing Aid Is No Easy Feat

The U.S. said it would soon begin using a pier to receive aid for the Gaza Strip but is struggling to set up distribution, marking a test for President Biden’s promise to ease a humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave.

The opening of the $320 million U.S.-built floating pier would mark the first major use of a sea route to deliver assistance to Gaza since the current conflict began. It involves hundreds of troops, several ships and a mission supported by humanitarian groups and several nations, including Israel.

The U.S. hopes to begin using the pier to deliver humanitarian assistance in the coming days, a White House spokesman told reporters Thursday, after Biden announced it in March during his State of the Union address.

The opening of the pier comes at a critical time in the more than seven-month-old conflict in Gaza. Israel has begun military operations in the southern city of Rafah, threatening the two main aid crossing points. The U.S., which opposes a Rafah invasion, has suspended a shipment of weapons. More than a million Gazans are experiencing famine-like conditions, according to a United Nations-backed system that monitors hunger crises worldwide.

But even as the pier is on the cusp of operation, U.S. officials said key details, including how the aid will be distributed once it reaches the shore, have yet to be sorted out.

“There’s a lot of moving pieces, literally and metaphorically here that need to come together for this to be effective,” said Shejal Pulivarti, deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the lead government agency for humanitarian assistance.

The U.S. Defense Department says it will coordinate logistics between the U.S. and Israeli militaries and USAID with the help of the Israeli military in Cyprus—where the aid arrives and is inspected—and a three-star U.S. Army general based at Hatzor Air Base near Ashdod, Israel.

The Israeli military said it is working closely with its U.S. counterparts and is preparing a 67-acre zone in Gaza to receive the humanitarian aid, but declined to comment on who would be responsible for distributing it in Gaza.

The U.S. hasn’t specified a plan for how the aid will be stored, secured and distributed once it reaches land, but American officials say they plan to work with the U.N. World Food Program. The U.N. agency will join the logistics effort “in the coming days,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.

U.N. officials say that the plan is still being figured out and they haven’t been privy to discussions on how the maritime corridor will function. “If we’re going to be expected to receive and unload ships with a bulk of humanitarian assistance, which would of course be welcome, we just want to know how we’re expected to do that,” said a senior U.N. official.

Senior U.N. officials have also voiced concern that the pier duplicates the work of humanitarian agencies working on the ground in Gaza, and because the U.S. is working with the Israeli military, the project could violate the principle of neutrality in war.

Martin Penner, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said the broader U.N. system will work with the U.S. on the maritime corridor “providing U.N. concerns over neutrality and security are addressed, and land access is also expanded.”

With the pier just days away from operation, the lack of concrete plans for securing and distributing the aid has raised concerns among some in the U.S. government. “It feels like we are throwing a party and we don’t know if anyone will show up,” a U.S. official said.

The potential risks associated with the pier are enormous. Some 200 aid workers have died in Gaza since the war began in October, including seven with World Central Kitchen—an aid group founded by celebrity chef José Andrés.

No clear authority exists on the ground to secure the distribution of the aid, which poses other problems. In February, more than 100 people were killed in an incident when Israeli forces opened fire during a stampede of people rushing to get aid from a convoy.

Hamas, the militant group in Gaza whose deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel set off the conflict, has said it would treat U.S. forces operating around the pier as an occupying force—an implicit threat to attack.

The floating pier also faces environmental challenges. The choppy waters in the Mediterranean Sea could damage the pier and make it unsafe for people to be on it, military officials warned. The U.S. military has delayed the pier’s installation because of weather.

Even once the pier is up and running, the availability of a steady supply of aid by sea isn’t guaranteed. Only about 8,000 pallets worth of aid is in Cyprus, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the plan, which is only a few days worth of supplies for the 2.2 million people in Gaza. U.S. officials said it wasn’t clear to planners how to provide additional aid to sustain deliveries.

Even if that problem is addressed, the pier has a more limited capacity compared with land crossings, which are a cheaper and more efficient way to provide humanitarian assistance. The pier would at first enable about 90 trucks of humanitarian aid a day to enter Gaza and then expand soon after to 150 trucks a day, officials say. Before the war about 500 trucks entered Gaza daily.

Other worries remained.

“Our concern is that the maritime corridor, instead of becoming a forward-looking access point for a future Palestine, a future Gaza,” said Bushra Khalidi, a policy lead at Oxfam, “looks like it will become another chokepoint.”

Write to Nancy A. Youssef at [email protected] and Jared Malsin at [email protected]