The U.S. military announced Wednesday that it will end the Gaza pier mission after only about three weeks of it being operational.
Since becoming operational in May, the pier has been one of the most utilized ways to get desperately needed aid into Gaza amid Israel's war against Hamas , even as it has been taken offline several times due to inclement weather and has proven inconsistent at best.
The mission itself was to accumulate aid in Cyprus, load it onto ships, transport it to the floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea, have U.S. forces unload it, and reload it onto smaller U.S. military vessels. Then, it was transported to a causeway, where it was brought onto the coast and into a marshaling area.
U.S. forces are not in Gaza, while humanitarian aid workers, mainly for the World Food Programme and the United Nations, were in charge of distributing the aid throughout Gaza, which also raised significant concerns, including that they could wind up an unintended casualty of the war.
U.S. officials maintain that the most efficient way to get aid into Gaza is through land routes between Israel and Gaza and Egypt and Gaza, though Israelis, Hamas, and Palestinian gangs have made the conditions much more difficult for aid workers to safely operate.
During the time the pier was operational, U.S. forces were able to transport nearly 20 million pounds of aid, which Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander at U.S. Central Command, told reporters Wednesday amounted to an “unprecedented operation.”
U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power estimated recently that enough food to feed about 450,000 people for a month was able to come through the pier operations, though the entire Gaza population is in desperate need of aid due to the war.
"Now that that maritime [joint logistics over-the-shore] surge mission was successful, it's now transitioning from a temporary pier in Gaza to a port in Ashdod, Israel," Cooper explained.
Aid will still come through the Mediterranean Sea, though it will now head to the Israeli Port of Ashdod, where it will then be transported by land into Gaza. Cooper said this alternative route is "more sustainable" and they've begun using it in recent weeks.
“I’ve been disappointed that some of the things that I put forward have not succeeded as well — like the port we attached from Cyprus,” President Joe Biden said last week, lamenting, “I was hopeful that would be more successful.”
Cooper previously said the weather conditions would only support this type of operation until August.
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Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has long been an opponent of the pier mission.
“This chapter might be over in President Biden’s mind, but the national embarrassment that this project has caused is not,” he said in a statement. “The only miracle is that this doomed-from-the-start operation did not cost any American lives. I have been calling for an end to this election-year gimmick since its primetime inception at the State of the Union. While I am glad it has finally concluded, we cannot buy back the $230 million needlessly spent, and significant questions remain about the Biden administration’s poor planning for this mission.”
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