‘They miscalculated’: Gaza’s floating aid pier failing to deliver in rough seas | The Guardian
‘They miscalculated’: Gaza’s floating aid pier failing to deliver in rough seas | The Guardian
The future of US military project costing $230m in question after weather and poor security prevent aid distribution
What a giant flop
It's clearly designed to be big and impressive and "look at all the expensive help we are providing" while not actually aiming to resolve the situation. It's a distraction
It's not even a distraction.
It's nothing more than a funnel for money to whichever military industrial complex contractor built it, with a flimsy veneer of "aid".
Every single aid organization calculated that this pier would be a drop in the bucket, even if it went according to plan. So blaming this on a "miscalculation" is ridiculous.
A wave hit it.
The last thing anyone would expect in the ocean
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A floating pier built by the US military for seaborne humanitarian deliveries to Gaza has proved itself to be fragile in the face of rougher seas than expected, and the future of the whole $230m project is now in question.
When he announced it in his state of the union speech on 7 March, Joe Biden said the temporary pier “would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day”.
Over the entire course of the pier’s operation so far, however, only about 250 truckloads of food and other humanitarian assistance (4,100 tonnes) have arrived by the planned maritime corridor, less than half of what would cross into Gaza in a single day before the war.
Since 274 Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces in the course of a hostage rescue mission on 8 June, the World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended the convoys that were supposed to take pallets of aids from the marshalling yard to warehouses and then to the 2.3 million people of Gaza under bombardment and facing famine.
The pier was intended as a means of getting aid ashore independently of Israel to the besieged and devastated coastal strip, after the Biden administration became frustrated with the lack of access for relief supplies through land crossings.
“With need in Gaza growing as well as the extreme insecurity that is making onward distribution from Keren Shalom in particular incredibly difficult for humanitarian organisations, the maritime pier is a critical additional conduit for aid deliveries,” a US official said.
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