The US military’s temporary pier to provide aid to Gaza will be offline for more than a week after a “confluence of weather storms” made it inoperable, an official said.
The situation has led to questions about how aid will be delivered if seaborne shipments are cut off to the embattled territory amid the war between Israel and Hamas.
The damage to the $320m pier, which will be unmoored and towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod for repairs, came just weeks after it became operational.
Defense Department spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that four US Army vessels supporting humanitarian aid shipments were impacted by heavy sea states over the weekend, causing motorised, floating pier sections to break free from their anchors and beach ashore.
Then, when a North African weather system struck on Tuesday, a portion of the structure separated from the rest of the structure, leading to damage that will require repair.
As of Tuesday, one section had been recovered, Singh said. It is hoped that the remaining three will be recovered by Thursday.
She also told reporters that rebuilding and repairing the pier will take “at least over a week” and it then will need to be re-anchored off the Gaza coast.
“The pier proved highly valuable in delivering aid to the people of Gaza. Thus, upon completion of the pier repair and reassembly, the intention is to re-anchor the temporary pier to the coast of Gaza and resume humanitarian aid to the people who need it most,” she said.
Some 1,000 tonnes of aid has been delivered from the pier to the marshalling area where goods are picked up by humanitarian organisations.
Singh said that supplies currently being loaded in Cyprus will have to be pre-positioned before delivery to the pier once it is put back in position, possibly by transferring the cargoes to other vessels.
“We had a perfect storm of high sea states, and then … this North African weather system also came in at the same time, creating not an optimal environment to operate … this temporary pier,” she said when a reporter asked what is to stop the pier from breaking apart again once it is reinstalled.
“Look, I can’t predict the weather, but we believe that given the time of year, we will be able to re-anchor this pier and it will be able to be operational, and, hopefully, weather conditions won’t hinder it any more.”
The problems have led to questions about the future effectiveness of the temporary structure, which drew the protests of Hamas and Egypt, according to a LinkedIn post by Indigo Monser-Kernosh, a defence and army intelligence analyst at Cornell University’s Jeb E Brooks School of Public Policy.
“The repeated setbacks and limited aid delivered so far undermine US claims that the pier would dramatically increase humanitarian access to Gaza,” he wrote.
“This damages American credibility in the region. Inability to get the pier operational as promised could be seen as a foreign policy failure for the Biden administration amid its re-election campaign.”
