The Navy Times reports that the US aid pier at Gaza will be permanently decommissioned. The $270 million pier could not be reattached this week because of heavy seas.
President Joe Biden announced the pier in his State of the Union address, pledging that “massive amounts” of humanitarian aid would come through it for Gaza civilians. The Pentagon is reported to have been taken aback by the announcement, on which they were apparently not consulted.
The little aid that came in through the pier could not easily be distributed because the Israelis have not permitted any governing force to replace Hamas, lest it prove the kernel of a Palestinian state. The security chaos created by the rolling Israeli military operations, which keep chasing people from one place to another, enabled armed gangs to form with an eye to usurping the aid.
The pier broke up in late May because of heavy seas, a problem that critics predicted before it was built. The pier’s humanitarian purpose was belied when it was usurped for a botched Israeli mission to rescue four hostages, in the course of which the Israeli military killed 270 innocents. That use of it ruined it for humanitarian purposes because it was then seen as an adjunct to the Israeli army and was marked as a target for Hamas. UN and other aid workers after that could not afford to have anything to do with the pier. The World Food Program had to hire anonymous contractors to take away the pallets brought in over it, lest they spoil.
It seems clear that the entire operation was a failed exercise in public relations by the Biden administration, which has sat on its hands while the extremist Netanyahu cabinet, full of the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, has half-starved or in some instances whole-starved the Palestinians of Gaza. A US administration has to have an answer when reporters ask it why it is allowing Palestinian children to become emaciated, and the pier was an attempted answer.
The other possibility was for the Biden administration to man up and just tell Netanyahu and his rogues’ gallery cabinet that they cannot starve innocent civilians as part of their campaign against Hamas, and that if they do not cut it out there will be hell to pay. But Biden is in the tank for the Israeli government. He keeps talking about knowing Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, and though neither was, let us say, nice to Palestinians, they were not genocidal maniacs in the mold of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Biden may or may not be up to the job of the presidency in general, but he certainly is not up to dealing with Netanyahu, whom he has literally enabled to get away with murder (tens of thousands of murders). And Secretary of State Antony Blinken has all the sympathy for the human rights of Palestinians that Henry Kissinger had for those of the Cambodians, East Timorese or the Chileans.