It remains to be seen whether the new operation in Ashdod will be more effective than the previous floating dock. Repeatedly pushed asideNor will it ease the concerns of U.S. officials and aid groups who have called on Israel to loosen its grip on supplies entering Gaza by land. The safety of humanitarian workers responsible for ensuring Palestinians have access to supplies is also a major obstacle, as fighting between Israel and the Palestinians continues. Hamas Distribution efforts have been paralyzed by the huge civilian casualties of the war.
Mr Cooper said around £1 million of aid had been moved out of Ashdod so far as part of a “proof of concept”, with millions more expected to move in the coming days.
He called the 20 million tonnes of aid that arrived at Gaza’s docks “the largest humanitarian shipment ever delivered to the Middle East,” though humanitarian groups say it is only a fraction of what is needed to address the hunger crisis in the Strip.
President Biden He announced the mission in March after Israel rejected requests from him and other leaders to open up more land routes for aid deliveries. At the time, Pentagon officials said the floating platform would be a temporary measure. Up to 2 million meals per dayCiting estimates from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which helps coordinate humanitarian groups working in the Gaza Strip, officials said on Wednesday that the total amount of aid delivered through the pier was enough to feed 500,000 Gaza residents for a month.
Administration officials have staunchly defended the deployment, but stressed that it was intended from the beginning to be a short-term operation.
In his State of the Union address in March, Biden said the scale of suffering and hunger in Gaza made the U.S. mission a moral necessity, and stressed that U.S. troops would not land there, appearing to walk a delicate balance between putting Americans at risk and standing by while hunger adds to the civilian deaths caused by the war.
But once underway, the operation, estimated to cost more than $200 million, faced numerous challenges. Rough seas kept coming and Damaged the structureThey have had to halt their operations several times. Importantly, aid groups that were expected to distribute food that arrived on land Reluctant to do soCiting persistent safety concerns, the government halted shipments, causing arriving cargo to pile up in coastal dumps, though officials say the backlog has been largely cleared.
“Too many aid workers have been killed in this conflict,” USAID said in a statement, and the agency continued to urge Israeli leaders to “do more to protect civilians and humanitarian workers so that aid can get into the hands of the Palestinian people.”
The jetties are floating structures connected to land by steel embankments and require calm seas to function safely – the opposite is often the case off the Gaza coast.
All told, the pier had been operational for more than 20 days, Cooper said. It was last operational in late June after a long move from a base in Virginia, U.S. military officials said. It was delivered on May 17th, which means that it was in operation for about one-third of its total time.
Sonali Korde, a senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said officials were confident relocating the humanitarian mission to Ashdod would be a viable solution, but acknowledged obstacles would remain.
“The main challenge we have right now in Gaza is the insecurity and lawlessness that is hindering the distribution of aid once it arrives in Gaza and at the checkpoints,” she told reporters.
“I’m disappointed that some of the things that I proposed weren’t successful,” Biden said at a news conference last week, especially the floating docks, which he said he “hoped would be more successful.”
Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a frequent critic of the president, heavily criticized Wednesday’s announcement, calling the mission “a national disgrace.”
Wicker and other Republicans had warned from the start that the pier’s deployment, along with the roughly 1,000 troops needed to build and operate it, would open up an attack window to America’s adversaries in the region. But those fears proved unfounded.
“It is a miracle that no American lives were lost in this operation that was predicted to fail from the start,” the senators said in a statement.
