The US military said aid deliveries to Gaza began Friday via a temporary floating pier aimed at ramping up emergency humanitarian assistance to the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
“Today at approximately 9 a.m. (Gaza time), trucks carrying humanitarian assistance began moving ashore via a temporary pier in Gaza,” the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement, adding that no US troops went ashore.
“This is an ongoing, multinational effort to deliver additional aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza via a maritime corridor that is entirely humanitarian in nature,” it said.
The pier was successfully anchored on Thursday, with around 500 tons of aid expected to enter the Palestinian territory in the coming days.
Photos released on Thursday by CENTCOM showed humanitarian aid being lifted onto a barge in the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod.
According to international organizations, the Gaza Strip is facing dire shortages of food and safe water and is at risk of famine amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
The arrival of aid convoys has slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control last week of the Gaza side of the Rafah Crossing. Egypt has refused to coordinate aid transfer through the crossing so long as Israel controls it.
The UN has said that opening up land crossing points and allowing more trucks convoys into Gaza is the only way to stem the spiraling humanitarian crisis.
The United Nations on Thursday said it was finalizing plans to distribute aid delivered via the pier, but stressed that delivering aid by land is the “most viable, effective and efficient” method.
“To stave off the horrors of famine, we must use the fastest and most obvious route to reach the people of Gaza – and for that, we need access by land now,” deputy UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said.
The US military announced earlier on Thursday that it had finished installing the pier after seven months of intense fighting in Gaza.
The final, overnight construction sets up a complicated delivery process, more than two months after US President Joe Biden ordered it in order to help Palestinians.
UN aid chief Martin Griffiths warned Thursday that famine was an immediate risk in Gaza with food stocks running out.
Egypt fears Israel is poised to launch a major offensive in Rafah. The IDF began sending troops into Rafah last week in what it has described as a “precise” operation, with soldiers currently holding a relatively small area southeast of the city. However, Israel has for months vowed a major offensive in the city as part of its war on Hamas, which began with the Palestinian terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on the country.
Amid airstrikes on Rafah, some 600,000 people or about half of the uprooted population sheltering there have fled to other areas of Gaza, sometimes returning to bombed-out houses or empty fields.
Griffiths said the global body was struggling to help them, with imports of aid all but halted through southern Gaza and fresh fighting adding to distribution challenges.
Israel says the Rafah operation aims to destroy the remaining Hamas battalions in southern Gaza and dismantle infrastructure used by the terror group. Israel accuses Hamas of diverting aid, which the terror group denies, despite multiple instances of video footage showing armed men atop humanitarian aid trucks in Gaza.
Griffiths had previously warned that a military operation in Rafah would be deadly and put the UN’s fragile humanitarian operation “at death’s door.”
The State Department said Thursday that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was continuing to deteriorate, urging Israel to do more to allow sustained access for aid via southern and northern parts of the enclave.
Speaking at a daily news briefing, State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said Washington remained concerned that both travel and the flow of fuel into Gaza via Rafah crossing has “come to a complete halt.”
Currently, three crossings are actively being used to transfer humanitarian aid from Israel to Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip: Western Erez, which was opened this week; Eastern Erez, opened earlier in May adjacent to the existing Erez Crossing; and Gate 96, the military’s entrance to central Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor, used for the first time for aid deliveries in March.
The Kerem Shalom Crossing is active for delivering aid from Israel to southern Gaza, but the halt at Rafah has had a negative effect on aid deliveries.
The war in Gaza erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 252 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Vowing to destroy the terror group and free the hostages, Israel launched a wide-scale military operation in Gaza. Israel says it is targeting all areas where Hamas operates, while seeking to minimize civilian casualties.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 35,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though only some 24,000 fatalities have been identified at hospitals. The tolls, which cannot be verified, include some 15,000 terror operatives Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
The IDF says 279 soldiers have been killed during the ground offensive against Hamas and amid operations along the Gaza border.