Biden’s pier plan for Gaza aid leads US into dangerous territory
The Cypriot port of Larnaca, with its tavernas, beaches and sunburnt British tourists, has become the site of a last resort for American diplomacy in the Middle East.
For months, President Joe Biden has been trying to convince Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, to allow aid trucks to travel unimpeded a few kilometres into Gaza from Israel and Egypt.
He failed. Now Biden has signed up to a new plan: Sending aid from Cyprus, 400km away, and deploying 1000 American soldiers to build a floating pier that would allow supplies to be unloaded on the Gaza shore - in the middle of a war zone, without American boots touching the ground.
It is, his critics say, a complicated, dangerous and costly workaround for a simple problem. Yet it is one of the few options Biden has been willing to take as his frustration with Israel's government rises along with the death toll in Gaza.
In the days after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, which killed more than 1200 people, Israel announced a siege of Gaza: Not one drop of water, no fuel and no electricity would enter the strip until 250 Israeli hostages were released.
Since then, 30,000 people, nearly half of them children, have been killed in the Israeli bombardment, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry.
Many more, say aid agencies, have died from preventable illnesses and injuries, because of a lack of medical supplies. A quarter are thought to be on the brink of starvation.
Only a tiny fraction of the aid required has been getting in. Aid agencies say the delivery is hampered by laborious Israeli inspections, and by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), who restrict movement of aid convoys once in Gaza. Israel denies this.
The announcement by Biden in his state of the union speech last week that the US would construct a floating port by Gaza is an attempt to rip up the status quo.
According to the Pentagon, US navy ships carrying equipment to build a floating pier will sail to Gaza from bases in Hawaii or Virginia, a journey of more than two weeks. Then, American troops will build the pier and anchor it to land in Gaza, without landing there themselves, and without risking their lives in what is a war zone.
“I think that it will be very difficult to set up, very difficult to manage, and the force protection risks will be pretty serious,” said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral in the US navy and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a think tank in Washington. “When the president talks about it, he acts as if no US forces will be ashore, but that’s not how you build something.”
Montgomery estimated that the US project would take between two and three months to set up, and could incur a significant risk to American troops.
The IDF would have to be closely involved. Since the war began on October 7, the coastal area has been a battle zone with Israeli warships taking part in the bombardment of targets in Gaza.
This is not just a matter of protecting the pier from Hamas snipers and rocket-teams. The beach areas of Gaza City were the scenes of pitched battles in recent months and will be infested with unexploded ordnance. Israeli forces are no longer deployed there. For the American pier to have any degree of safety, they will have to return and secure the landing area, which would almost certainly mean renewed battles.
Under the US-led plan, aid would be flown to Cyprus, where it would be inspected by Israeli authorities. Once cleared, aid ships would sail to a mile or so off the Gaza coast and, since Gaza does not have a deep-water harbour, unload the cargo on to a temporary offshore maritime pier. The cargo would then be transferred to landing ship vehicles and sent to a floating causeway anchored to land in Gaza. Israel has refused to allow the port of Ashdod, just up the coast from Gaza, to be used in aid supply missions.
“It’s embarrassing,” said one Western diplomat working on Gaza, who did not want to be named. “We’ve got all this leverage and what, they’re just blocking the trucks, so we have to go round?”
It is also unclear who would distribute the aid once it arrived in Gaza.
Some experts and aid workers dismissed the US initiative as a symbolic step. “I don't think it’s designed to change anything, because it’ll take weeks to actually complete, and people are literally dying of hunger now," said Khaled ElGindy, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “It's a sign of frustration on the part of the Biden Administration I suppose.-”
“It’ll take weeks to actually complete, and people are literally dying of hunger now.”
Khaled ElGindy, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute