The pier is finally working — but aid is still not getting to Gazans

Aid is now flowing reliably onto the beach in Gaza via the troubled U.S. military-built pier — but it is still not reaching any of the desperate Gazans inside the enclave.

Tons of food and medical supplies are now piling up on the beach awaiting distribution, as the humanitarian organizations tasked with moving the aid refuse to resume operations due to security concerns, according to U.S. officials and aid group representatives. And there is increasing alarm about food going bad the longer it sits in the marshaling area, according to people involved in the project.

The backlog is part of a wider problem throughout Gaza, where aid groups have suspended much of their work because of fears they could be targeted by Israeli airstrikes. The U.N. has threatened to halt all of its aid operations across the enclave unless Israel takes urgent steps to better protect their workers, the AP reported on Tuesday.

“The hostile operating environment makes it nearly impossible for humanitarian operations to deliver food aid,” said Steve Taravella, a spokesperson for the World Food Programme. “Restoring order is crucial for an effective humanitarian response to meet soaring needs. UN agencies and others need a safe environment to be able to access people and scale up.”

The pier resumed normal operations on Tuesday after a scheduled maintenance pause on Monday, according to a Pentagon spokesperson. The resumption follows weeks of intermittent operations, as bad weather forced U.S. military personnel to remove, repair and then re-anchor the pier to the beach several times. On Sunday, U.S. military personnel moved 720 metric tons, or 1.5 million pounds, of aid across the pier to the beach, the most delivered on a single day so far, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Monday.

But aid groups, including the World Food Programme — the U.N. group charged with distributing the aid from the pier — have stopped traveling to the beach to pick up the aid in part because of the fallout of a deadly Israeli hostage operation June 8, according to three aid representatives working in Gaza. They and others were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive ground operations.

The U.N. has suspended operations as the organization conducts a “security assessment,” a USAID spokesperson told POLITICO on Monday.

The Israel Defense Forces used a truck that bore the appearance of an aid vehicle — but did not have an aid group insignia — to travel inside Gaza to rescue the four from the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central part of the enclave, two senior aid representatives working inside Gaza said. The IDF also landed a helicopter near the pier as a staging ground for exfiltration. The raid set off a fierce firefight between Hamas and the IDF, killing hundreds of civilians, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Now, aid staffers fear they will be targeted.

The potential risk to aid workers "was something WFP and the UN pushed back on from the beginning,” said one senior aid representative. “They knew the concerns and expressed those concerns upfront. What the IDF did made everything more difficult.”

The Pentagon this month dismissed claims made on social media that the IDF used the pier for the raid. “The pier, the equipment, the personnel all supporting that humanitarian effort had nothing to do” with the Israeli rescue operation, Ryder told reporters on June 11.

U.S. officials hope the movement of aid can resume soon.

“Humanitarian conditions are absolutely dire in Gaza. Particularly with ongoing uncertainty over onward distribution from land crossings, and periodic windows of bad weather, sending more aid into Gaza currently is beneficial so that once the security conditions allow, aid can quickly be moved for onward distribution,” the USAID spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said officials working on the pier have prioritized “shelf-stable aid that is able to withstand fluctuations in weather.”

But some people involved in the project are particularly concerned that much of the food aid that has been delivered and is sitting exposed to the sun will go bad, for instance beans and flour.

"There are food kits that are designed to be more stable and are packaged to withstand the elements. But a good portion will soon be unusable,” said one person working on the pier operation.

“I believe we will have a problem with spoilage with some of the food if it sits too long,” the person said.

“This is not a good story for the Pentagon,” one aid representative said. “This is something they’ve invested a lot of time and money into and it is not unfolding the way they thought it would.”