Watchdog highlights internal pushback to Gaza pier before Biden approval

The Biden administration pushed ahead with the construction of a humanitarian aid pier off the coast of Gaza despite internal warnings that such an effort would face serious challenges, a government watchdog report said.

The Tuesday report from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Inspector General (OIG) said discussions before the pier mission was announced cast doubt on the efficiency of deploying a large-scale maritime corridor from scratch to get aid into Gaza.

A Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance official interviewed for the report said USAID staff advocated for land routes instead of a pier system, which would face logistical and technical challenges. They also raised concern that a pier mission would distract from getting aid in through land routes, according to the report.

President Biden announced the pier during his State of the Union speech in March, making the commitment as humanitarian aid into Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war was falling far below what was needed. Palestinians in Gaza are still struggling to access basic necessities like food, water and medicine, the United Nations says.

After the pier was announced, U.S. officials pivoted to ensuring it could work, the OIG report said. But the World Food Programme (WFP) also expressed concern and asked for certain requirements, including locating the pier in northern Gaza to facilitate transfers along a certain route, establishing security for the mission and ensuring humanitarian aid would continue to enter the territory through land routes.

The U.S. instead put the pier in central Gaza, which was closer to Palestinians in need, and did not find a country that could provide security after Israel declined, citing the need for neutrality for humanitarian aid missions, the OIG said.

The pier was expected to be used for about three months, before facing rough seas and storms in the fall. But when it became operational in late May, the pier immediately faced challenges with the weather.

It operated intermittently for 20 days, having to be taken offline multiple times because of high seas, before the Pentagon decided to end the mission in July. The first time the pier broke down, ships marooned onto the beaches of Israel after the causeway broke off. Repairs on the pier were done in the Israeli port city of Ashdod.

On shore, distributors also struggled to get humanitarian aid into the hands of Palestinians, facing numerous challenges with the security environment, the OIG found. That included looting and attacks on warehouses, along with Palestinian hesitancy over a mission they saw as militarized.

The U.S. military has used the pier system, called a Joint Logistics Over-the Shore (JLOTS), in other crisis zones before, but the $230 million Gaza assembly was the first time they had used it in an active combat area, according to the OIG.

The mission goals set out by USAID to supply aid to 500,000 or more Palestinians each month for three months also failed, with enough aid to feed just 450,000 for one month, the OIG report said.

The JLOTS worked with humanitarian aid primarily coming from the island of Cyprus in barges and unloading the aid onto a floating dock a few miles off the shore of Gaza.

Army boats and ships then transported the aid to the pier attached to a beach, where aid workers with the WFP and Israeli troops took them onto the shore to ensure U.S. boots were not on the ground in Gaza.

Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the White House's National Security Council, said Tuesday that the Biden administration was "honest and transparent about the challenges."

"From the beginning, we said this would not be easy," Savett said in a statement. "But the bottom line is that given how dire the humanitarian situation in Gaza is, the United States has left no stone unturned in our efforts to get more aid in, and the pier played a key role at a critical time in advancing that goal. The United States continues to take all possible action to ensure increased aid flows are sustained at the scale needed to meet needs on the ground."

The OIG said it interviewed officials from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and WFP for its report but not Defense Department officials, citing the scope of its review. The watchdog said it "closely coordinated" its work with the Pentagon's inspector general, which is also reviewing the maritime corridor.