Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander at U.S. Central Command, told reporters in a Pentagon briefing on Wednesday that the pier achieved its intended effect in what he called an “unprecedented operation.”
As the U.S. military steps away from the sea route for humanitarian aid, questions swirl about Israel’s new plan to use the port at Ashdod as a substitute.
There are few details on how it will work and lingering concerns about whether aid groups will have enough viable land crossings to get assistance into the territory besieged by the Israeli war. But Cooper said the Ashdod corridor will be more sustainable.
Critics call the pier a $230 million boondoggle that failed to bring in the level of aid needed to stem a looming famine. The U.S. army, however, has maintained that it served as the best hope as aid only trickled in during a critical time of near-famine in Gaza and that it got close to 20 million pounds (9 million kilograms) of desperately needed supplies to the Palestinians.
Joe Biden, who announced the building of the pier during his State of the Union speech in March, expressed disappointment that it didn’t do as well as hoped.
“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,” Biden, a Democrat, said during a news conference last week. “I was hopeful that would be more successful.”
Planned as a temporary fix to get aid to starving Palestinians, the project was panned from the start by aid groups that condemned it as a waste of time and money. While U.S. defence officials acknowledged that the weather was worse than expected and limited the days the pier could operate, they also expressed frustration with humanitarian groups for being unable and unwilling to distribute the aid that got through the system, only to have it pile up onshore.
A critical element that neither the aid groups nor the U.S. military could control, however, was the Israeli defence forces whose brutal military attack on Gaza put humanitarian workers in persistent danger and in several cases cost them their lives.
As a result, the pier operated for fewer than 25 days after its installation on May 16, and aid agencies used it only about half that time due to security concerns.
Stuck in the middle were the more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors who largely lived on boats off the Gaza shore and struggled to keep the pier working but spent many days repairing it or detaching it, moving it and reinstalling it due to the bad weather.
The tensions played out until the final moments, as senior Biden administration officials signalled the end of the pier project days ago but U.S. Central Command baulked, holding out hope the military could reinstall it one last time to move any final pallets of aid ashore.
Most would agree that the use of the maritime route and what is known as the Army’s Joint Logistics Over the Shore capability, or JLOTS, fell short of early expectations. Even at the start, officials warned of challenges because the sea was shallow, the weather was unpredictable and it was an active war zone.
The U.S. also had to train Israeli troops and others on how to anchor the pier to the shore because no U.S. troops could step foot on Gaza soil, a condition Biden has had.
However, enough aid to feed 450,000 people for a month flowed through the pier, according to the United States Agency for International Development, which coordinated with the United Nations and others to get supplies to people in need. As important, humanitarian leaders say, the pier operation laid the groundwork for a coordination system with the Israeli government and military that they can expand on.
The one place where deconfliction with the Israeli army worked well was at the pier, which came online at a time of some of the greatest despair and food shortages, USAID Administrator Samantha Power said.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday that a new Pier 28 will soon be established at Israel’s Ashdod port for delivering aid to the Gaza Strip as a replacement for the U.S. military-built pier. He did not say when it would start operating.
Other aid groups, however, slammed the U.S. military pier as a distraction, saying the U.S. should have instead pressured Israel to open more land crossings and allow the aid to flow more quickly and efficiently through them.
Everyone has agreed all along that land crossings are the most productive way to get aid into Gaza, but the Israeli army routinely has blocked routes and slowed deliveries due to inspections. israel has killed more than 278 workers in the war.
As the Pentagon and the Army take stock of how the pier did, questions will loom about whether officials underestimated the persistent weather challenges and security hurdles that hindered the operation.
The system is run by the Army's 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary) at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia. And it's like a huge LEGO system — an array of 40-foot-long (12-meter-long) pieces of steel that can be locked together to form a pier and causeway.
It's unclear if U.S. forces were adequately prepared for the unpredictable and turbulent weather in the Gaza region. Nine days after the pier was installed on the Gaza shore, bad weather broke it, forcing troops to dismantle it and take it to the Israeli port at Ashdod for more than two weeks for repairs.
Weather forced troops to detach the pier from the shore two more times and move it to Ashdod. It was detached for the final time on June 28, and poor weather prevented the U.S. from reinstalling it.
Aid groups struggled to distribute the supplies from the pier into Gaza, and their efforts came to an abrupt halt after a June 8 Israeli raid that rescued four captives but killed hundreds of Palestinians.
Troops used an area near the pier to land a helicopter and fly out the captives. To have even a small part of an Israeli military operation so close to the pier creates problems for aid groups who rely on being independent and separate from troops to remain safe.
As a result, the U.N. suspended all World Food Program deliveries while it conducted a review, which has not been released. WFP personnel have not distributed aid from the pier since but hired contractors to move aid that piled up on shore to warehouses so it would not spoil.
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