Gaza Pier Construction Close to Finish: By the Figures

U.S. forces are close to completing construction of a temporary port in the Mediterranean Sea off Gaza’s coast, but the weather has proven to be a recent obstacle.

They temporarily paused construction of the pier on Thursday due to forecasted high winds and high sea swells, according to U.S. Central Command. The military vessels involved in the pier’s construction, as well as the pier itself, were moved to the Israeli Port of Ashdod.

150 aid trucks a day

Pending further weather delays, the pier should be operational within a number of days. At initial operating capacity, U.S. forces should be able to get a throughput of 90 aid trucks a day and scale up to 150 daily at full operating capacity, according to a senior military official.

The U.S. is effectively building a floating pier that will be about two miles off Gaza’s coast as well as a causeway that will jut out from the beach into the water. Ships packed with humanitarian aid will depart from Cyprus and sail to the pier, where those goods will then be unloaded and reloaded onto smaller ships, known as LCUs for “landing craft utility” and LSVs for “logistics support vessels,” where the aid will then be transported to the causeway. The aid will then get taken off the ships, put on trucks, and driven down the causeway and to shore, where it’ll be handed off to humanitarian groups for distribution.

U.S. forces will not be driving the trucks down the causeway and back, nor will they be on the ground in Gaza to distribute aid.

U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power said on Friday that more than 500 pallets of aid had arrived in Cyprus, including enough food to feed 11,000 people for a month, ready-to-use therapeutic foods for more than 7,000 malnutrition cases in children, and relief supplies for more than 33,000 people, and will “soon be routed [through] the maritime corridor.”

$320 million construction

It is expected to cost roughly $320 million, according to deputy Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh.

The construction of the pier has required about 1,000 U.S. forces and will take about two months to build once it’s operational in total.

The pier is supposed to provide another way for the international community to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s war against Hamas. International experts have warned that every Palestinian in Gaza is facing the threat of famine.

Several entities and governments have called on Israel to allow more aid into Gaza for several months.

President Joe Biden threatened to condition U.S. military aid to Israel after Israeli forces launched an errant drone strike that killed seven aid workers on April 1. Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly that Israel would have to take several steps to allow more aid into the strip to keep the U.S.-Israeli military partnership as is.

The strike that killed the seven World Central Kitchen aid workers highlighted the dangerous nature of being in Gaza even for humanitarian employees.

There are also difficulties getting aid from Gaza’s borders to the people who need it most.

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“Yesterday was the first major shipment of aid from Jordan over this new land route through Erez crossing,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Thursday. “The convoys from the Jordan military that brought the aid in unloaded the aid inside Gaza. It was then picked up by a humanitarian implementer for distribution inside Gaza, and that aid was intercepted and diverted by Hamas on the ground in Gaza.”

“The U.N. is either in the process or has by now recovered that aid, but it was an unacceptable act by Hamas to divert this aid to begin with, to seize this aid. We have made clear that it’s an unacceptable act. I think the U.N. partners will be also making clear that it’s an unacceptable act,” he added.