Aid starts to flow into Gaza through military pier after days of delays

Humanitarian aid has finally started to flow into Gaza through a U.S. military-built pier, top U.S. officials said on Wednesday, after days of delays due to logistical and other problems.

As of Wednesday morning, the U.S. military had brought in more than 600 metric tons of aid from Cyprus, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown said during an event at the Atlantic Council in Washington. Some of that aid has now left the beach and is heading toward desperate civilians in Gaza, he said.

"Aid is flowing,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “It is not flowing at the rate that any of us would be happy with, because we always want more.”

The Defense Department anticipates that by the end of the day on Wednesday, more than 800 metric tons of aid will have arrived at the marshalling area, according to a DOD official, who was granted anonymity to speak about internal estimates. More than half of that is expected to reach the citizens of Gaza by the end of the day, the official said.

During his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. military would deploy the floating pier off Gaza . Officials at the time said the White House was making the move because Israel wasn’t allowing enough trucks to deliver humanitarian aid through ground routes.

U.S. troops finished installing the floating pier on Thursday, and the first trucks rolled off the platform early Friday, but deliveries to the warehouses were temporarily halted after hungry Palestinians looted several of the initial U.N. trucks.

U.S. officials breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday as trucks began to leave the assembly area on their way to the warehouses throughout Gaza for further distribution.

The U.S., Israel and the United Nations, which is in charge of distribution, are now planning new truck routes to get aid to the people of Gaza, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday.

Part of the problem is aid groups wanting to ensure “appropriate coordination” with the Israel Defense Forces, the DOD official said.

The issue is “the aid organizations that are actually driving it from the marshalling area to the points of need feeling that the routes are safe, the aid will remain secure so they can get it to the warehouse and prepare it for distribution."

Particularly after an Israeli drone strike killed seven aid workers with the World Central Kitchen this year, humanitarian groups are increasingly distrusting of the IDF and reluctant to work in Gaza.

Aid groups have said the IDF has made it more difficult to truck their aid into Gaza, forcing some organizations to travel through highly populated areas where vehicles are likely to be swarmed by hungry Gazans.

Some aid workers have also said the IDF is too slow to process the trucks at the border, forcing aid groups to travel through the roads of Gaza late at night when protection is at its lowest.

“As this pier, you know, continues to move towards full operational capability, you'll start to see more aid coming in, and you'll start to see the numbers increase in terms of the amount of aid that's brought into the assembly areas,” Ryder said.

Asked about the flow of aid into Gaza via the pier, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) — who has been vocal in his criticism of the project — said the mission is futile, risks troops’ lives and should be halted entirely.

“This primetime directive has been nothing but a failure,” he said in a statement, adding that Biden “needs to cut his losses, pull up the pier, and turn our men and women around before there is a catastrophe.”

Many aid groups in Gaza also don’t view the pier as a productive way to increase the flow of aid into Gaza, said Michael Wahid Hanna, U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group think tank.

The groups “see it as a distraction,” he said. The U.S. is “pouring money into this thing when you have overland access that’s just not being utilized.”

Matt Berg and Erin Banco contributed to this report.