How Biden's Gaza pier project was revealed by Reuters
By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The first time President Joe Biden's administration considered ordering the U.S. military to build a floating base near Gaza to deliver aid by late 2023, it was thrown into disarray.
The United States was under pressure to ease the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn Palestinian Territory, which had been exacerbated by Israel's closure of many of the country's borders, and sea deliveries were seen as a possible solution.
US Admiral Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and chief of Navy surface warfare, told the meeting that he was very concerned that the sea might be too rough for the ship to deliver humanitarian aid and set weather-related information. risk, said a former US official and a current US official.
It wasn't until early 2024 that the idea came up again as the situation in Gaza grew more desperate and aid agencies warned that mass starvation among the Palestinian population was imminent.
“We've reached a point where it seems appropriate to take risks because the need is so great,” said a former senior Biden administration official.
The resulting pier work did not go well.
It includes 1,000 US troops, which delivered a fraction of the promised aid of nearly 230 million dollars, and from the beginning has been plagued by bad luck and misbehavior, including fire, bad weather and accidents along the coast of the war between Israel and Hamas. .
Biden, after promising a “dramatic increase” in aid, admitted the hole fell short of his ambitions. “I was hoping that would be successful,” he told reporters on July 11.
Internal discussions about the Gaza Strip, including the discarded options of briefly deploying troops to the area, have not been previously reported.
The pier operation, which officially ended last week, was the most controversial of the US military's efforts to help stop the Israel-Hamas war that broke out on October 7, 2023, and has drawn criticism from Biden's Republican critics and many others. current and former employees.
The effort also underscores the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to end the conflict, a focus of his visit to Washington this week.
The Pentagon referred questions about the scene to comments made at a July 17 briefing with Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of US Central Command. In it, Cooper said the operation was a success, launching the largest aid ever to reach the Middle East.
Mike Rogers (NYSE: ), the Republican who heads the Pentagon oversight committee in the House of Representatives, called the pier “disgraceful.”
“This place was a political calculation that was poorly thought out by the Biden administration,” Rogers told Reuters.
THERE ARE NO BOOTS ON EARTH
As alarm rises 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 various government agencies to consider ways to increase aid to Gaza.
“(It was a request) for the agencies to put everything they have on the table,” said the former executive. The Pentagon then began looking at options.
Asked for comment, the NSC agreed to inter-agency discussions on possible policy options.
“Thanks to this operation, we were able to advance the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, using all the tools we had,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the NSC.
When the head of the Central Command of the military, General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, first told the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin about the work of the pier, his first proposal included a limited number of US troops on the ground, temporarily, to attach the area to the coast. , said the former official.
Austin knew the White House was opposed to sending U.S. troops to Gaza and asked Kurilla to go back and reorganize, a U.S. official and former official said.
Kurilla created a program to train Israeli forces to carry out landmines, a former official said. Later the Israeli army carried out this plan. The Israeli prime minister's office and the Defense Ministry referred Reuters' questions about the hole to the US military.
Kurilla's Central Command declined to comment on the record. A US defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, denied the account and said “boots on the ground were never considered.”
Current and former officials have described Central Command as very optimistic that the pier project will succeed.
“CENTCOM and General Kurilla, from Day 1, have been consistent in saying: 'We can do this,'” said the former US official.
The first turn of misfortune came on April 11, when a fire broke out in the engine room of the USNS 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo, a Navy ship transporting part of the pier system to the Mediterranean.
The crew extinguished the fire but the ship had to turn back to the United States.
THREE WAVES
The weather was an even bigger problem.
An early warning of the challenges of rough seas came last summer, when the US military tried to drill a hole off the coast of Australia during a military exercise.
The sea was very rough, a military officer working directly at the training ground told Reuters.
Ultimately, the military was unable to connect the pier to the beach itself, and instead brought supplies ashore using boats to bridge the gap between the end of the float and the sea.
American officials admit that the Mediterranean climate has been a concern. But they were not ready to see how bad the sea conditions became.
“The forecast they had (was) that the sea level would actually be three or less until September,” said one senior US defense official, referring to the third sea region, where waves do not exceed three feet.
Instead, the waves wrecked the ship nine days after it went into service on May 16. The damage was so bad that it had to be moved to the Israeli port of Ashdod for repairs.
This incident would prove a trend, with bad weather keeping the mast out of action for all but 20 days — half the time it took to cross the sea to Gaza.
Although there were no known casualties or direct attacks in the area, three US soldiers sustained non-combat injuries in support of the crater in May, and one was medically evacuated in critical condition.
SPREAD WITH GREAT ASSURANCE
Bringing food, shelter and medical care ashore by ship was also more difficult than expected.
The US military aims to mobilize up to 150 trucks a day of aid from the area.
But because the pit was only active for 20 days, the military said it only delivered a total of 19.4 million pounds to Gaza. That would be 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the area, based on World Food Program estimates from earlier this year by truck weight.
The United Nations says an estimated 500 aid trucks are needed every day to meet the needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
A few days after the first aid landed at the port in Gaza, crowds filled the trucks and took one of them.
Israel's killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near a fishing port during a hostage rescue operation in June also dented the confidence of aid agencies, which the US relied on to bring supplies from the coast. and responsive to residents.
A senior US defense official admitted that the delivery of aid “proved to be more challenging than planners had anticipated.”
One former executive said Kurilla raised distribution as a concern early on.
“General Kurilla also made that clear: 'I can do my part of this, and I can be distributed if you assign me to do it,'” said the former officer.
“But that was clearly defined what the task was. So we relied on these international organizations.”
Current and former US officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid agencies themselves had remained cool in the region.
At a closed-door meeting of American officials and aid agencies in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the UN humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden's project.
But Kaag insisted that the UN prefers “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the talks.
The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It was referring to Monday's briefing where the agency's spokesman said the UN appreciates all means of getting aid to Gaza, including the fishing ground, but more access through land routes is needed.
What was of great concern to aid organizations was that Biden, under pressure from some Democrats regarding Israel's killing of civilians in Gaza, was pushing for a solution that would be a temporary solution and at worst would take pressure off the Netanyahu government to open the country's roads. Gaza.
Dave Harden, former USAID mission director in the West Bank and Gaza, described the project as “humanitarian theater.”
“It has eased the pressure, unfortunately, for the (world border) crossings to be effective.”