The US has also planned to continue to provide airdrops of food, which likewise cannot meet all the needs.
The U.S.-built temporary pier taking humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians will be removed from the coast of Gaza to be repaired after getting damaged in rough seas and weather, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
Over the next two days, the pier will be pulled out and sent to the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, where U.S. Central Command will repair it, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters. She said the fixes will take “at least over a week” and then the pier will need to be anchored back into the beach in Gaza.
The pier, used to carry in humanitarian aid arriving by sea, is one of the few ways that food, water and other supplies are getting to Palestinians who the U.N. says are on the brink of famine amid the nearly 8-month-old war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The setback is the latest for the $320 million pier, which only began operations in the past two weeks and has already had three U.S. service members injured and had four of its vessels beached due to heavy seas. Deliveries also were halted for two days last week after crowds rushed aid trucks coming from the pier and one Palestinian man was shot dead. After that, the U.S. military worked with the U.N. and Israeli officials to select safer alternate routes for trucks, the Pentagon said Friday.
The pier was fully functional as late as Saturday when heavy seas unmoored four of the Army boats that were being used to ferry pallets of aid from commercial vessels to the pier. The system is anchored into the beach and provided a long causeway for trucks to drive that aid onto the shore.
Two of the vessels were beached on Gaza and two others on the coast of Israel near Ashkelon.
Before the weather damage and suspension, the pier had begun to pick up steam and as of Friday more than 820 metric tons of food aid had been delivered from the sea onto the Gaza beach via the pier.
U.S. officials have repeatedly emphasized that the pier cannot provide the amount of aid that starving Gazans need and said that more checkpoints for humanitarian trucks need to be opened.
