Failure of the floating dock in Gaza

US Department of Defense Friday Announce The floating dock built by the US military off the coast of the Gaza Strip to deliver aid to the Palestinian population has been removed and may not be rebuilt. The decision to remove the dock, which was completed in mid-May, shows the failure of the Joe Biden administration’s project: at a cost of $320 million, the dock has already been dismantled and reassembled several times due to various problems, and has contributed only minimally to the delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilian population in Gaza.

The reasons for the failure of the dock are several: first, the technical difficulties of building a floating dock in the open sea, which exposes the structure to the elements; and second, the logistical difficulties of delivering aid to the Palestinian population. Due to the military activities of the Israeli army in the area, only a very few aid trucks were able to reach the UN warehouses for distribution.

The floating dock was announced in March by the Joe Biden administration as a way to alleviate the horrific conditions for the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, which did not have access to humanitarian aid in particular in that period: in those weeks there were various testimonies from people and children. They died of hunger. Since the announcement, the Biden administration has made it clear that the dock will be an emergency solution, and above all a partial solution: it alone will not be able to meet the needs of the people of Gaza, but it can contribute to alleviating the situation. Hunger at a time when the Israeli army prevented the passage of aid through land crossings. When fully operational, just over a quarter of Gaza’s aid needs were supposed to pass through the dock: this never happened.

After some delays, the pier was completed in mid-May. It was a very complex infrastructure.

The temporary pier (whose official name is JLOTS: Joint Logistics Overshore Services, which can be translated as “Coordinated Logistics on the Coast”) consisted of two parts: a large floating platform moored off the strip and the real pier, specifically, which was directly connected to the coast by a long walkway. It was created so that trucks could pass over it. Humanitarian aid arrived from Cyprus via large cargo ships, docked on the floating offshore platform. The aid is then unloaded onto the platform and loaded onto smaller military ships, which transport it to a pier anchored on the coast. From there, they were finally loaded onto trucks that transported them to the mainland, where they were handed over to the United Nations World Food Programme’s mission, which would handle the distribution.

Since the first days of operation, the pier has faced problems and setbacks. Among other things, the delivery of aid to the population was very difficult because in the Gaza Strip all the structures for maintaining order collapsed, and the convoys departing from the coast into the interior of the Strip were systematically attacked by desperate Palestinians.

Just over 10 days after its opening, at the end of May, the pier’s activity had already been suspended due to damage caused by bad weather: parts of the pier were dismantled for repair. On June 8, the pier was reopened, but on the same day Israel carried out a violent military operation in the pier area, recovering four Israeli hostages alive, but killing more than 270 Palestinians.

Two warehouses of the World Food Programme – the UN agency that was in charge of distributing aid – were involved in the operation. They were hit by missiles.At that time, the director of the World Food Program announced that the distribution of aid from the dock had stopped, because the safety of its staff could no longer be guaranteed. The United Nations also feared that its neutrality was being compromised, due to the spread of rumors that the US military had made the dock facilities available to support Israel in the military operation (the US military he refused).

Since then, the WFP has never resumed aid deliveries. The US military continued for a while to bring humanitarian aid to the coast via the pier, storing it in protected staging areas. But with no one to distribute it, humanitarian aid is effectively off-limits. On Friday, with the ISIL areas on the coast at their maximum capacity, the military announced the removal of the pier.

In fact, the dock was fully operational for about ten days, from mid-May until the end of the month, while in June it was limited to collecting aid in sorting areas on the coast, but it was not delivered. In all, according to the United States, 8,831 tons of aid entered Gaza via the dock, about 4,500 tons of which remain stuck in sorting areas.