Topline: President Joe Biden announced his plan to build a floating pier for humanitarian assistance in Gaza during his State of the Union speech in March. Four months later, the $230 million project is barely treading water.
The Pentagon announced yesterday that the pier will “soon cease operations.”
Key facts: About 1,000 U.S. soldiers spent two months building the pier on the Gazan coast, which opened on May 17.
Over the next few days, rough seas and civilian unrest disrupted the transfer of aid supplies. White House staffers learned on May 25 the pier was about to fall apart — just hours after Biden bragged about the project in a speech at West Point, per CNN. That forced the Pentagon to spend over a week repairing the dock with help from the Israel Defense Forces.
The pier was only usable for 12 days between May 17 and June 23, according to The Guardian.
In that time, the U.S. delivered only 250 truckloads of food and supplies, less than half of what would arrive in Gaza in a single day before the war, according to The Guardian. Most of it is stuck at the pier; officials fear it’s too dangerous to deliver the food to Gazans because of airstrikes and street conflicts.
John Hannah, a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, wrote in the Washington Examiner that the U.S. team tasked with getting aid to Gaza knew the pier was a “dumb idea” as early as last December.
Critical quote: Dr. Hanan Balkhy, the head of the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean region, told the Associated Press that the pier won’t do much to address the humanitarian crisis.
“The pier has supported a little bit, but it’s not to the scale that is needed by any stretch of the imagination,” Balkhy said. “So we need to emphasize on the land routes to ensure the amount and the quantity and the efficiency.”
Background: Previous reporting from OpenTheBooks.com revealed that the Biden administration has also sent $1.2 billion in Palestinian aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, including $121 million since Oct. 7. Funding was paused in January.
Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com.
The Wall Street Journal reported that 10% of UNRWA staff have ties to Islamic extremists, and there is currently draft legislation in the Israeli parliament to officially label UNRWA as a terrorist organization.
Summary: The humanitarian crisis in Gaza needs pragmatic, responsible solutions — not half-broken boondoggles.
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