The Pentagon’s maritime aid operation faces immediate obstacles in Gaza

The Pentagon’s highly anticipated plan to deliver aid to suffering Palestinians via a floating pier off the Gaza Strip has encountered almost immediate logistical and security setbacks, officials said Tuesday, marking an inauspicious start to the mission intended to ease a severe humanitarian crisis there.

After desperate people seized food destined for a United Nations warehouse over the weekend, U.S., Israeli and aid officials have begun discussing alternative routes into Gaza, said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon’s spokesman.

“The goal, of course, is to get this humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people who need it most,” Ryder told reporters. He said that 569 metric tons of aid, supplied by the United States along with European and other nations, has been consolidated on the shore. It is unclear how much of that aid has left the site for distribution in Gaza.

U.S. military personnel shipped the pier to the Mediterranean and assembled it at great cost in recent weeks. The obstacles facing the operation, which began making deliveries into Gaza on Friday, are another reflection of the complex conditions created by the war between Israeli forces and Hamas militants, and the acute humanitarian crisis the conflict has engendered.

According to officials with the U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP), 10 trucks’ worth of food assistance were delivered from the U.S.-established staging area to a U.N. warehouse Friday.

[U.N. halts all food distribution in Rafah after running out of supplies in the southern Gaza city]

On Saturday, however, some aid was looted during a subsequent delivery to the storage facilities. Of 16 trucks transporting aid from the staging area that day, five arrived with shipments intact, while most or all of the food parcels were taken from 11 other trucks, WFP said.

Many of the details about the nascent aid operation remained unclear Tuesday, and officials gave conflicting accounts about the situation on the ground.

While Ryder said that none of the U.S.-facilitated aid had been distributed to civilians in Gaza, where U.N. officials are sounding the alarm about famine conditions, WFP officials said that some of that aid had reached recipients.

WFP spokesperson Shaza Moghraby cautioned that “safe and consistent access” and “basic operating conditions” for delivering assistance would be required for the operation.

“To minimize the risk of that happening again, we need sufficient supplies to enter Gaza and our security concerns addressed,” Moghraby said. “Community acceptance and trust that this is not a one-off delivery is key for the success of the operation. It would be very difficult to proceed otherwise.”

The challenges facing the delivery effort come as the Biden administration pushes Israel, as it has for months, to help relieve the dire conditions faced by Palestinians.

U.S. officials have said additional access points must be opened to allow more aid into Gaza after the closure of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in the south, while also citing challenges in aid distribution within the ravaged territory. The United Nations has sought security guarantees from Israel to allow distribution.

The effort to establish a functional seaborne delivery route is one reflection of the differences now plaguing Washington’s ties with its closest Middle Eastern ally, also at odds over Israel’s plan to launch an offensive into Rafah and the refusal of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to support an eventual Palestinian state.

The U.S. military has also been dropping aid shipments by air. But aid groups say that those two means will not satisfy the massive needs in Gaza, where hunger and disease are now rampant.

Ryder said the complexity of operating in a war zone, rather than poorly executed planning or coordination, led to the slow start of aid delivery. The estimated cost to the U.S. government is about $320 million, officials have said.

“We’ve been very clear from the beginning that we’re going to take a crawl, walk, run approach to make sure that we are implementing this system in a way where we’re working out … the procedures, and including taking into account the security conditions,” Ryder said. “So I think you’re going to see, as we work together, the amount of aid increase and the ability to get it distributed increase. But we never said it was going to be easy.”

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, scrutinized the Biden administration’s rationale for surging weapons into Israel while its government has impeded the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

“How can we in good conscience continue to supply Netanyahu with weapons for a war where he restricts access to humanitarian aid like food, medicine, fuel at the expense of women and children?” Durbin asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a hearing Tuesday.

Blinken acknowledged that for Netanyahu, allowing aid “has not been the priority that it should have been,” but argued that Israel was not pursuing a specific strategy of restricting humanitarian access, and added that the war was of Hamas’s making.

As Blinken sought to defend the Biden administration’s foreign policy, Durbin also raised doubts about President Biden’s decision to build the floating pier at such expense when the problem of aid access could be solved by Israel agreeing not to impede its flow.

“It strikes me,” Durbin said, “that we’re building extraordinary temporary piers at a cost of millions of dollars because the Israelis will not open up the gates to let the trucks in.”