By: The Editors – nationalreview.com – May 30, 2024

President Biden’s $320 million project to build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza, announced during his State of the Union address as an innovative way to deliver more humanitarian aid to Palestinians, is out of service just two weeks after opening.

The T-shaped floating structure, which contains a large platform that allows boats to unload aid off the coast, and then a narrow strip for moving the food and supplies from the platform to shore, broke apart during a storm in the Mediterranean Sea. Four boats that had been used to take supplies from the platform to the shore got tossed about and ran aground.

Two boats had drifted off and gotten stuck on the Israeli side of the border, with two more getting beached near the pier.

But that’s not all.

Last week, while the pier was still operational, Pentagon spokesman Major General Patrick Ryder said that it had enabled 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance to get to the beaches of Gaza. But — key point — just because aid makes its way into Gaza, it doesn’t mean that it made it to the intended recipients. It turns out that the aid was looted once NGOs tried to distribute it. When asked whether any aid had actually made it to the Palestinians in need, Ryder admitted, “I do not believe so.”

Construction of the pier also resulted in noncombat injuries to three American service members (one was critically injured).

It would be one thing if these occurrences were unpredictable — i.e., merely bad luck. The damage to the pier and inability to get aid to those in need, however, were among the likely outcomes when Biden gave the order for the military to build the pier in a desperate effort to quell the “Genocide Joe” chants.

The type of temporary pier being used is essentially a series of floating segments held in place with anchors. A 2006 Naval War College paper on the type of pier being constructed in Gaza noted that it was not designed to operate where there are waves exceeding three feet or winds in excess of 15 miles per hour. Neither of these conditions is uncommon in the occasionally choppy waters off the coast of Gaza.

As for the looting of humanitarian aid, this has been the reality for the past several decades, and a challenge throughout the war in Gaza. Getting aid through the checkpoints and into Gaza is the easy part. The difficulty is distributing the aid without its getting ripped off by Hamas or other gangs that hoard supplies for themselves and sell it on the black market — not to mention the problem of Palestinians who can’t afford the black-market prices directly stealing goods from the trucks themselves. Indeed, there was only ever one way for the U.S. government to ensure that humanitarian aid, distributed by NGOs, made it to those who needed it while staying largely out of the hands of Hamas, and that was for the U.S. to support a serious ground invasion of Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces until Hamas was destroyed. Joe Biden has refused to do so purely out of the wish to mollify his domestic critics on the left flank of his party.

In the meantime, various pieces of the pier have been moved north, onto the Israeli side of the coast, for repairs that are expected to take at least a week. But the problems facing this harebrained scheme will still remain even if it is put back in service.

Biden’s Gaza pier will be remembered along with the downed helicopters in Jimmy Carter’s botched Iran hostage-rescue mission as a metaphor for a failed foreign policy.

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Source: Biden Gaza Port Project Failure: Metaphor for Failed Presidency | National Review