The Spectrum & Daily News

No boots on the ground

WASHINGTON – The first time President Joe Biden’s administra­tion considered ordering the U.S. military to build a floating pier off Gaza to deliver aid in late 2023, it was put on the back burner.

The United States was under pressure to ease the humanitari­an crisis in the war-torn Palestinia­n enclave, which had been worsened by Israel’s closure of many land border crossings, and sea deliveries were seen as a possible solution.

The resulting pier mission did not go well.

It involved 1,000 U.S. troops, delivered only a fraction of the promised aid at a cost of nearly $230 million, and was from the start beset by bad luck and miscalcula­tions, including fire, bad weather and dangers onshore from the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Biden, after promising a “massive increase” in aid, acknowledg­ed that the pier had fallen short of his aspiration­s. “I was hopeful that would be more successful,” he told reporters July 11.

The pier mission, which was formally ended last week, was the most controvers­ial of the U.S. military’s attempts to help contain the fallout from the IsraelHama­s war that erupted on Oct. 7.

The effort also underscore­s the humanitari­an crisis in Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s struggles to bring the conflict to a close.

The Pentagon referred questions about the pier to remarks made at a July 17 briefing with Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command. In it, Cooper said the mission was a success, delivering the largest amount of aid ever into the Middle East.

Mike Rogers, the Republican who leads the Pentagon’s oversight committee in the House of Representa­tives, called the pier “an embarrassm­ent.”

“The pier was an ill-conceived political calculatio­n by the Biden administra­tion,” Rogers told Reuters.

With alarm rising over the humanitari­an crisis in Gaza in 2023, Curtis Reid, chief of staff at the White House National Security Council, was tasked with creating a working group with different government agencies to look at ways to increase aid into Gaza.

“(It) was a request for agencies to put everything you got on the table,” the former senior official said. The Pentagon then started looking at options.

Asked for comment, the NSC acknowledg­ed interagenc­y discussion­s on potential policy options.

“Because of this work, we were able to advance the delivery of humanitari­an assistance into Gaza, utilizing every tool possible,” said Adrienne Watson, an NSC spokespers­on.

When the head of the military’s Central Command, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, initially briefed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about the pier mission, his first proposal included a limited number of U.S. troops on the ground, temporaril­y, to attach the pier to the shore, the former official said.

Austin was aware that the White House was opposed to deploying U.S. forces to Gaza and asked Kurilla to go back and rework it, a current U.S. official and the former official said.

Kurilla created a plan to train Israeli forces to do the installati­on of the pier on the shore, the former official added. Israeli forces later carried out the plan. The Israeli prime minister’s office and defense ministry referred Reuters’ questions about the pier to the U.S. military.

Kurilla’s Central Command declined to comment on the record. A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied the account and said “boots on the ground was never a considerat­ion.”

Overestima­ting distributi­on

Delivering the food, shelter and medical care that was brought onshore through the pier also proved harder than expected.

The U.S. military aimed to ramp up to as many as 150 trucks a day of aid coming off the pier.

But because the pier was only operationa­l for a total of 20 days, the military says it moved a total of only 19.4 million pounds of aid into Gaza. That would be about 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the pier, based on estimates by the World Food Program from earlier this

Israel’s killings of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near the pier as it staged a hostage rescue recovery mission in June also dented the confidence of aid organizati­ons, on whom the U.S. was relying to carry the supplies from the shore and distribute to residents.

A senior U.S. defense official acknowledg­ed that aid delivery “proved to be perhaps more challengin­g than the planners anticipate­d.”

One former official said Kurilla had raised distributi­on as a concern early on.

“Gen. Kurilla was also very clear about that: ‘I can do my piece of this, and I can do distributi­on if you task me to do it,’ ” the former official said. “But that was explicitly scoped out of what the task was. And so we were reliant on these internatio­nal organizati­ons.”

Current and former U.S. officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid organizati­ons themselves were always cool to the pier.

At a closed-door meeting of U.S. officials and aid organizati­ons in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitari­an and reconstruc­tion coordinato­r for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden’s pier project.

But Kaag stressed the U.N.’s preference was for “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the discussion­s.

The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It referred to a briefing on Monday where a spokespers­on for the organizati­on said that the U.N. appreciate­d every way of getting aid into Gaza, including the pier, but more access through land routes is needed.

Dave Harden, a former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza, described the pier project as “humanitari­an theater.”