American-built Gaza pier unusable after suffering serious damage

Heavy seas are blamed for sections cracking off of the $320 million aid delivery station.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The pier that the Americans built off the Gaza coast to facilitate aid delivery to Palestinians has broken and is currently unusable, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

“The rebuilding and repairing of the pier will take at least over a week, and following completion will need to be re-anchored to the coast of Gaza,” Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a briefing.

The section attached to the beach will be detached and moved to an Israeli city for repairs.

Officials are blaming heavy seas for the fact that sections have fractured off not even two weeks after the huge floating dock became operational.

Four ships that had stabilized the pier had also become detached due to bad weather over this past weekend. Two got stuck on a beach a few miles away, near Ashdod. One of them was pulled off after more than a day of various attempts, including by the Israeli navy.

Recent videos circulating on social media showed a large section of the pier seemingly floating free close to shore, and at least one video claimed that a part had sunk.

The pier had been used to offload humanitarian aid coming in by sea, with trucks running the pallets of food, water and medical supplies to Gazan warehouses managed by international aid organizations.

The US army is only in charge of the operation on the sea-end, with no personnel on the ground of the coastal enclave.

US Central Command posted to X on Sunday that that 903 metric tons of aid had successfully been “distributed from the beach transfer point to the U.N. warehouse” after being transported from the pier.

How much of it has been actually received by needy Gazan citizens is the question.

When announcing the total tonnage that had arrived ashore last week, the Pentagon spokesperson admitted that as far as the Americans knew, none of the aid had yet to get to its intended, civilian recipients.

Critics of the pier project, which had been announced by President Joe Biden in March, included several Republican lawmakers. One, Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, told Fox News Digital Saturday that the trucks were getting “ransacked,” and “When they do make it to the warehouse, it’s Hamas controlling the warehouses,” so the terrorists would benefit instead of ordinary civilians.

Opponents also decried the project’s whopping $320 million price tag, which they pointed out was only for the first 90 days of the pier’s operation.

The now-needed repairs will raise that price immediately.