Gaza aid pier to cost $320 million
JERUSALEM — A U.S. Navy ship and several Army vessels involved in an American-led effort to bring more aid to the besieged Gaza Strip are offshore of the enclave and building a floating platform for the operation, which the Pentagon said Monday will cost at least $320 million.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters the price is a rough estimate and includes the transportation of equipment and pier sections from the U.S. to the Gaza coast, as well as the construction and aid delivery operations.
Satellite photos analyzed Monday by the Associated Press show the U.S. Navy ship Roy P. Benavidez, a Bob Hope-class vehicle cargo ship operated by the Military Sealift Command, about 5 miles from the port on shore, where the base of operations for the project is being built by the Israeli military.
The General Frank S. Besson Jr., an Army logistics vessel, and several other Army boats are with the Benavidez, and crew members are working on the construction of what the military calls the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system.
A satellite image from Sunday by Planet Labs PBC showed pieces of the pier in the Mediterranean Sea alongside the Benavidez.
A U.S. military official confirmed late last week that troops on the Benavidez had begun construction and were far enough offshore to ensure their safety.
Singh said Monday that the next phase of the project will be construction of the causeway, which will be anchored to the beach.
U.S. and Israeli officials have said they hope to have the floating pier in place, the causeway attached to the shore and operations underway by early May.
The cost of the operation was first reported by Reuters.
Under the plan by the U.S. military, aid will be loaded onto commercial ships in Cyprus to sail to the floating platform. The pallets will be loaded onto trucks, which will be loaded onto smaller ships that will travel to the metal, floating two-lane causeway. The 1,800-foot causeway will be attached to the shore by the Israeli Defense Forces.
The U.S. military official said an Army engineering unit teamed with an Israel Defense Forces engineering unit in recent weeks to practice installing the causeway, training on an Israeli beach just up the coast.
The new port sits just southwest of Gaza City, north of a road bisecting Gaza that the Israeli military built during the current fighting against Hamas. The area was the territory’s most populous before the Israeli ground offensive rolled through and pushed more than 1 million people south toward the city of Rafah on the Egyptian border.
Israeli military positions sit on either side of the port, which was built as part of an effort led by World Central Kitchen out of the rubble of buildings leveled by Israel. That effort halted after an Israeli airstrike killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers April 1 as they traveled in clearly marked vehicles on a delivery mission authorized by Israel. The organization says it is resuming its work in Gaza.
Aid has been slow to get into Gaza, with long backups of trucks awaiting Israeli inspections. The U.S. and other nations have used air drops to send food into Gaza.
The U.S. military official said deliveries on the sea route initially will total about 90 trucks a day and could quickly increase to about 150.
Aid organizations have said several hundred such trucks are needed every day.
In the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and saw roughly 240 taken hostage, Israel cut off or heavily restricted food, water, medicine, electricity and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip. Under pressure from the U.S. and others, Israel says the situation is improving, though United Nations agencies have said much more aid is needed.
Gaza, slightly more than twice the size of the city of Washington and home to 2.3 million people, is on the precipice of famine. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the fighting began, local health authorities say.
On Sunday, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the amount of aid going into Gaza would continue to scale up.
“This temporary pier will provide a ship-to-shore distribution system that will further increase the flow of humanitarian aid,” he said in a statement.
But high-ranking Hamas political official Khalil alHayya told the AP that the group would consider Israeli forces — or forces from any other country — stationed by the pier to guard it as “an occupying force and aggression,” and that the militant group would resist it.
On Wednesday, a mortar attack targeted the port site. There were no injuries.