Humanitarian aid has reached Gaza’s coast via the U.S.-built pier in the Mediterranean Sea on Friday for the first time.
Getting the pier and causeway operational has been more than two months in the making, and it is viewed by officials in the United States as a way to supplement the primary way of getting aid to Palestinians, which is by land, through crossings between Gaza and Egypt and Gaza and Israel. President Joe Biden directed the military to construct the pier to help alleviate the humanitarian crisis back in early March.
“Today at approximately 9 a.m. (Gaza time), trucks carrying humanitarian assistance began moving ashore via a temporary pier in Gaza. No U.S. troops went ashore in Gaza,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement. “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, and will involve aid commodities donated by a number of countries and humanitarian organizations.”
All of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents are facing acute food insecurity, according to Sonali Korde, the assistant to the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance.
Deputy Commander of U.S. Central Command Vice Adm. Brad Cooper said on Thursday: “We have about 500 tons of humanitarian assistance, loaded on ships, that’s about a million pounds ready for delivery in the coming days” and that “thousands of tons of aid are in the pipeline.”
Cyprus plays a critical role in the maritime aid route. Aid travels there, where it’s then screened and palletized. The aid then gets loaded onto commercial or military vessels that will travel from there to the pier, which is anchored in the Mediterranean. The aid will then be transported to smaller U.S. military vessels that will travel the rest of the way to the causeway, which is connected to the Gaza coast. The smaller ships can get closer to the coast than the bigger ships.
Afterward, the aid will be unloaded and put onto trucks, which will be driven down the causeway and then unloaded where humanitarian workers will distribute. U.S. forces are not involved with driving the trucks down the causeway and back, nor will they be in Gaza to distribute the aid, as the United Nations is leading that aspect.
About 200 aid workers have been killed during the war, prompting questions about deconfliction between Israeli forces and aid organizations.
“We have the two deconfliction cells that have been set up in Cyprus and in Israel,” deputy Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said on Thursday. “It is to ensure that we have our NGO partners, the U.N., sitting side-by-side with us, with the IDF, to make sure that we’re all talking to each other, that deconfliction does happen, and so that these aid convoys can continue on.”
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“You have folks from the U.N., from USAID, from the U.S. military, and from the IDF embedded together, sitting next to each other in these cells, working to ensure that there is deconfliction happening as these trucks leave the marshaling area,” she said.
Roughly 1,000 U.S. troops are involved in the mission, but none are in Gaza.