Is the American-built pier in Gaza useful or a fiasco?

FOR six kilometres the road is a dusty moonscape without a hint of civilian life. The Netzarim corridor, as Israel calls it, slices across Gaza’s narrow waist, from its border with Israel to its Mediterranean coast. The buildings on both sides have been pancaked into piles of rubble. As a convoy bounces along the rutted track, there are no Palestinians in sight, only Israeli soldiers and army vehicles and a constant swirl of grit. And then there is a dazzle of blue: the corridor ends at the sea, and the hulking steel pier that America spent $230m to install on Gaza’s shore.

In March, when Joe Biden announced the pier, he made it sound straightforward. Gaza had a problem with hunger. America had a whizzy solution; a modular floating causeway that its army would haul halfway around the world and assemble in the Mediterranean. It would, the president said, provide a “massive increase” in aid.

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The reality was more complicated. The pier was finished on May 16th but was soon damaged by rough seas. It was operational for just two of its first six weeks.

When The Economist visited the pier on June 25th, the first journalists to see it from inside Gaza, it was working again: two landing craft unloaded their cargo in just over an hour. Lorries drove off the vessels and down a causeway made of interlocking steel segments. They delivered pallets to a staging area, an expanse of beach flattened by the Israeli army and surrounded by berms and concrete barriers.

The Pentagon says the pier has delivered over 6,200 tonnes of aid this way since it was first installed, equal to 25 to 30 lorries a day—not trivial, but far short of the 150 a day that America promised.

Still, the pier is just one piece of a larger aid operation. Supplies are also entering through Kerem Shalom, the main commercial crossing in the south, and via three land crossings in the north. “We’re trying to create different places of entry in order to have less friction,” says Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israeli army spokesman.

This spring, briefly, aid workers said things were improving. In March the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed initiative that measures hunger, said that hundreds of thousands of people in northern Gaza would face famine within two months. But its latest study, published on June 25th, found that famine had been avoided, albeit temporarily, by a big increase in aid deliveries since March.

The good news ends there. The IPC said that 495,000 Gazans (almost 25% of the population) still face “catastrophic” levels of hunger. More than half of Gazans have sold their clothes to buy food; one in five goes entire days and nights without eating.

The staging areas next to the American-built pier have two sets of gates. Lorries coming from the pier use those on the west side, next to the sea, to deposit their cargo. The eastern gates are for Palestinian drivers arriving to pick up aid. But the Israeli army says no one has come through those ones for two weeks, and that 7,000 pallets of aid (mostly food) have piled up in the staging areas. Your correspondents saw long rows of them, most bearing the logo of the World Food Programme (WFP). Aid is getting into Gaza—but no one is distributing it.

Israel blames Hamas for the delays. The group has repeatedly attacked the pier and Kerem Shalom, periodically halting aid deliveries from there. “The distribution problem is something hard to manage,” says Mr Hagari. “The international community has to make more of an effort.”

Aid workers say much the same about Israel. On June 25th the UN warned that it would suspend its operations in Gaza unless the Israeli army co-ordinates more with them. Sending a convoy to pick up supplies involves many delays, often in areas with spotty communication and nearby fighting. “We’re going to ask for the green light to move that empty truck to a waypoint, and then wait for the green light to move to another waypoint,” says Matthew Hollingworth of the WFP. “Your 12-hour days have one hour of action.”

Many Palestinians are sceptical of the pier. On June 8th Israeli troops freed four hostages being held by Hamas a few kilometres away. A video filmed by an Israeli soldier showed them being brought to a helicopter near the pier and then evacuated from Gaza. It has fuelled conspiracy theories that America built the pier for military purposes rather than to deliver aid.

At Kerem Shalom, where aid has been piling up for weeks, Mr Hollingworth likens the stretch of the main road leading away from the crossing to something out of a Mad Max film: “Any truck that goes is going to lose its wing mirrors, people will try to smash the windscreen, people will try to get in.” Much of the violence is the work of criminal gangs using aid lorries to smuggle cigarettes (now costing up to $25 each) into the enclave. Neither the Israeli army nor Hamas make the road safe.

The UN insists that only a lasting truce will solve the humanitarian crisis. That does not look imminent. On June 23rd Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said he was willing to make a “partial deal” to release some of the hostages in Gaza. “But we are obligated to continue the war after a pause,” he added in an interview with a right-wing Israeli network.

His comments sparked anger in Israel, because he seemed to be abandoning many of the hostages. They also upset officials in Washington because in May Mr Biden endorsed a proposal that could end the war for good. A day later Mr Netanyahu seemed to backtrack, saying he was still “committed” to Mr Biden’s suggested deal.

The back-and-forth was typical of a prime minister who has long wavered on whether to make a hostage deal, as most Israelis want, or continue the war, as his right-wing supporters demand. Hamas, for its part, wants firmer guarantees that the deal will end the war permanently. Like his plan for the pier, Mr Biden’s efforts at diplomacy are crashing into a hard reality.

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