US nears completion of $320mn floating pier for Gaza aid

The US military is nearing completion of a $320mn floating pier off Gaza, a complex project to allow seaborne humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

Hundreds of US troops have spent weeks building the structure, aimed at easing the dire humanitarian crisis in the strip, to which reliable access by land has been disrupted by the war.

US naval vessels have been ferrying specialised building equipment to a point about two miles offshore where aid ships from Cyprus will dock once the pier is complete.

From there, a fleet of smaller craft will take the goods to a site on the Gaza shore, where 70 acres of land have been cleared by the Israeli military. The Pentagon estimates that the initiative has already cost $320mn.

Test runs on the pier — called the Joint Logistics Over the Shore, or JLOTS — could begin this month, and it is only expected to operate until the autumn, when the weather changes, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The project, which was promised by US President Joe Biden in early March, is aimed at bypassing land routes — which have been damaged by the conflict — to allow enough aid into the territory to rescue Gaza from the precipice of a famine.

But it is unclear whether such a complex and costly effort to transport aid by sea is necessary. US officials have repeatedly said that Gaza has several border crossings from which the enclave could be “flooded with aid”.

This week, Israel announced the reopening of the Erez crossing to facilitate the entry of aid. Two other additional entry points into Gaza have also recently been created by the Israeli military.

But international aid groups warned that the JLOTS plan could divert attention from these more efficient land routes, adding that it would not resolve the more serious problems of damaged roads and inspection bottlenecks.

“It’s a wasteful distraction,” a senior UN official, who requested anonymity, said of the new pier. “There are roads, there are border crossings — there’s [already] aid waiting outside Gaza.”

Humanitarian groups and the US agree that transporting goods into Gaza by truck is the best way to ensure that Palestinian civilians receive the thousands of tonnes of aid that the UN and other international bodies have purchased.

The UN said in March that all of Gaza was on the verge of a man-made famine and that starvation was spreading through the northern half of the enclave.

Nadav Shoshani, a spokesperson for the Israeli military, made clear that the pier would not aim to replace other routes, but would be “in addition . . . and it will allow a faster route into north Gaza”.

Convincing Israel to streamline and facilitate the transfer of more aid into Gaza has become the focus of an international diplomatic effort. The country only allowed flour shipments and other aid to transit via its Ashdod port after weeks of pressure.

The UN and other agencies complain that there are too few scanners at Israeli security checks, trucks are arbitrarily refused passage through checkpoints and the main roads within Gaza are unsafe.

The aid destined for the US pier will be inspected by Israel in Cyprus. US officials hope this will speed up deliveries once the assistance “hits the beach” in Gaza. Israeli inspections at land borders have been a recurring bottleneck, the UN and other aid agencies have said.

A sizeable portion of Israel’s rightwing opposes the delivery of aid to Gazan civilians until Hamas releases the hostages it still holds, and police have done little to break up periodic protests along the route that trucks would have to take.

At full capacity, the pier and its adjoining infrastructure may be able to handle the equivalent of about 150 trucks of aid per day, a US official told reporters last week.

Before the war, Gaza received about 500 trucks of aid per day, a number that has fallen to about 200 per day over the past six months, according to UN and Israeli military figures. Israeli officials insist that the number of trucks entering Gaza in the past two weeks has often surpassed 400 per day, though the UN disputes this.

The UN estimates that Gaza needs as many as 1,000 trucks of aid per day for several weeks to overcome the deep shortage of food, medicine and other critical supplies that has built up over the past few months.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken acknowledged on a visit to Israel this week that there had been some improvements in aid provision, but that more still had to be done. “The progress is real but given the need, given the immense need in Gaza, it needs to be accelerated, it needs to be sustained,” he said.