National security adviser Jake Sullivan says the US will “wind down pier operations” in “a relatively short period of time.”
The United States has said it will soon end operations of its pier designed to boost the flow of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip amid Israel's ongoing war.
The $230 million pier has repeatedly broken away from shore due to weather conditions since its initial installation in mid-May, and the project also faced problems with the distribution of aid due to conditions on land.
“I anticipate that within a relatively short period of time, we will be done with pier operations,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday.
Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement that “the pier will soon cease operations and that more details about that process and timeline will be available in the coming days.”
A United Nations report says 96 percent of Gaza's population is food insecure and one in five Palestinians, or about 495,000 people, face famine amid Israel's nine-month war on the territory.
While the dock has brought 8,100 metric tons of aid to a staging area off the Gaza coast since it began operating in May, the 370-meter (1,200-foot) floating dock has had to be removed several times due to bad weather.
Sullivan said the pier helped bring urgently needed food and other aid to Gaza, but that additional supplies are now reaching the Palestinian enclave via land routes.
“The real issue right now is not getting aid to Gaza, but getting it to Gaza effectively,” he told reporters.
Military personnel attempted to re-anchor the temporary Gaza pier to the beach on Wednesday due to technical and weather problems, but were unable to do so.
The project has also been hampered by security threats that prompted aid agencies to halt distribution of food and other supplies to Gaza.
Aid groups have said that while any amount of food for Gaza is welcome, many have criticized the project as a costly distraction and say the United States should focus on pressuring Israel to allow more aid across land borders, long seen as the most productive option.
The UN suspended all World Food Programme (WFP) deliveries from the pier after an Israeli military raid on June 8 that secured the release of four Israeli hostages but killed hundreds of Palestinians, citing concerns that troops used a nearby area to helicopter out the rescued hostages.
Aid arriving at the pier began to pile up in the safe zone of the beach, but the WFP eventually hired contractors to move it to storage areas for later distribution. The US Department of Defense said this week that a significant amount of the aid had been removed.
