


Just two weeks after opening, President Biden’s $320 million Gaza pier has sustained enough damage to bring aid deliveries to a halt. But it isn’t as if aid was actually getting to the Palestinian population during the brief period when it was fully operational.
Yes, in case you haven’t been keeping tabs on Biden’s Lego project, the Gaza pier is every bit the disaster we all expected when Biden made the ridiculous proposal in his State of the Union address back in March.
Under the design of the pier, aid is supposed to be delivered onto a massive platform off of the coast of Gaza, and then moved down a long causeway to the beach, where it is supposed to be picked up by NGOs for distribution within Gaza. But a storm in the Mediterranean Sea severely damaged the causeway, and four boats that had been used to ferry supplies from the platform to the shore drifted away and got stuck on the beach — two on the Israeli side, and two in Gaza. The pier is now being taken out of service for repairs.
Last week, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder boasted that 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance had made it to the beaches of Gaza, but upon follow up, conceded that the aid was looted once NGOs tried to distributed. When asked, in follow up, whether any aid had actually made it to the Gazans for whom it was intended, said, “I do not believe so.”
In addition, three U.S. service members suffered noncombat injuries in the building of the pier (one critically).
This debacle was not only predictable, it was predicted by many. As I wrote when it was announced:
So even if the port project goes perfectly (and the U.S. military is capable of some amazing things) and more aid flows in, it doesn’t really solve what happens to the aid once it hits the shore. Who is preventing it from getting looted, hoarded by Hamas, and sold on the black market for prices that are unaffordable to those most in need?
Months and hundreds of millions of dollars later, the Biden administration has not answered this basic question.