U.S. forces have completed the construction of the pier and causeway built off Gaza‘s coast to provide the international community a maritime option for getting desperately needed aid into the strip.
On Thursday, the pier was anchored to the beach in Gaza, completing its construction, and aid shipments will begin “in the coming days,” U.S. CENTCOM Deputy Commander Vice Adm. Brad Cooper told reporters.
“Thousands of tons of aid are in the pipeline,” he added. “We have about 500 tons of humanitarian assistance, loaded on ships, that’s about a million pounds ready for delivery in the coming days.”
Palestinians in Gaza are in desperate need of humanitarian aid including potable water, food, medicine, and shelter. All of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents are facing acute food insecurity, according to Sonali Korde, Assistant to the Administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance.
The new maritime aid opportunity is not designed to replace other means of getting aid to Gaza, rather it’s viewed as a supplementary option. Officials have repeatedly said getting aid to Gaza through land crossings between Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt is the primary method.
Aid will be brought to Cyprus where it will be screened and palletized before being loaded on commercial or military vessels that will travel from there to the pier, which is anchored “several kilometers” from the Gaza coast, Cooper said. The aid will then be transported to smaller U.S. military vessels where it will travel the rest of the way to the causeway. The smaller ships can get closer to the coast than bigger ships. The aid will then be unloaded and put onto trucks where it will be driven down the causeway and unloaded.
U.S. officials have said they anticipate beginning with about 90 trucks per day coming over the pier via an attached floating causeway before ramping up to 150 trucks per day as they work through any initial hurdles.
Other countries, including the United Kingdom and France, will be contributing as well.
U.S. forces will not drive the trucks down the causeway and back, nor will they be on the ground in Gaza to distribute aid; the United Nations will.
About 200 aid workers have been killed during the war, and deconfliction measures between the IDF and humanitarian organizations “are not where they need to be given the complexity of the environment.
The “protection of U.S. forces participating is a top priority. And as such, in the last several weeks, the United States and Israel have developed an integrated security plan to protect all the personnel,” said Cooper. “We are confident in the ability of this security arrangement to protect those involved.”
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The completion of the causeway was delayed by bad weather in the region, though weather is not expected to disrupt the transports of aid, according to deputy Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh.
It’s unclear how long the pier will be in place but defense officials have stressed it will be temporary.
