President Joe Biden plans for the U.S. military to construct a U.S.-operated pier off the coast of Gaza. The pier would then be used to transfer additional humanitarian supplies from ships to trucks and into the Palestinian territory. Increased aid flows are a priority amid major food and medical shortages in Gaza.
Still, it bears asking why the U.S. feels the need to build a pier in order to get more aid into Gaza. Israel’s aid monitoring protocols mean that trucks attempting to deliver aid into Gaza often face long delays and rerouting. This reinforces the deleterious humanitarian situation on the ground. Further complicating matters are Hamas efforts to seize aid for its own purposes, thus reducing the aid available for civilians. The situation is dire. Child malnutrition and mortality rates are now an urgent concern, for example.
The complexity involved in establishing a temporary pier is, however, significant. While the Biden administration says no U.S. military personnel will enter Gaza to secure the truck debarkation and unloading areas, someone will have to do so. Otherwise either the area will be controlled by Hamas and criminal gangs and/or civilians will rush the trucks. Aid won’t get to where it is most needed. The pier will also need defending from terrorists who might wish to add American body counts to their name/organization.
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A far better alternative would appear to be found in getting Israel to increase the efficiency of land corridors into Gaza. American economic and munition leverage would seem sufficient to persuade Israel to support this effort. But in the absence of this approach, it’s likely that what’s really going on here is an effort by the Biden administration to send signals to both domestic and foreign audiences.
On the domestic front, the 2024 Biden presidential campaign is increasingly concerned by the frustration of Muslim voters in swing states such as Michigan. Those voters want both an immediate end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas and a massive expansion of aid to the Palestinians. At the same time, U.S. allies in the Middle East and Europe are putting significant pressure on the Biden administration to ensure that more aid gets into Gaza. The physical appearance of this pier and daily supplies of aid thus offers the administration a means to show physical action in support of Gazan civilians.
It also buys political space for continued Israeli military operations by the greater mitigation of civilian suffering in tandem with those operations. Finally, this perhaps allows Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to deflect pressure from his coalition that he is allowing too much aid into Gaza via land routes. Netanyahu can now rely on the U.S. to manage those aid supplies, meaning that Israel does not have to.
Regardless, this effort will be complicated, expensive, and fraught with risk.