Biden’s $270 mn Gaza Aid Pier to be Mothballed, but “Famine has spread across the Entire Gaza Strip”
Juan Cole 07/12/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Navy Times reports that the US aid pier at Gaza will be permanently decommissioned. The $270 million pier could not be reattached this week because of heavy seas.
President Joe Biden announced the pier in his State of the Union address, pledging that “massive amounts” of humanitarian aid would come through it for Gaza civilians. The Pentagon is reported to have been taken aback by the announcement, on which they were apparently not consulted.
The little aid that came in through the pier could not easily be distributed because the Israelis have not permitted any governing force to replace Hamas, lest it prove the kernel of a Palestinian state. The security chaos created by the rolling Israeli military operations, which keep chasing people from one place to another, enabled armed gangs to form with an eye to usurping the aid.
The pier broke up in late May because of heavy seas, a problem that critics predicted before it was built. The pier’s humanitarian purpose was belied when it was usurped for a botched Israeli mission to rescue four hostages, in the course of which the Israeli military killed 270 innocents. That use of it ruined it for humanitarian purposes because it was then seen as an adjunct to the Israeli army and was marked as a target for Hamas. UN and other aid workers after that could not afford to have anything to do with the pier. The World Food Program had to hire anonymous contractors to take away the pallets brought in over it, lest they spoil.
It seems clear that the entire operation was a failed exercise in public relations by the Biden administration, which has sat on its hands while the extremist Netanyahu cabinet, full of the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, has half-starved or in some instances whole-starved the Palestinians of Gaza. A US administration has to have an answer when reporters ask it why it is allowing Palestinian children to become emaciated, and the pier was an attempted answer.
The other possibility was for the Biden administration to man up and just tell Netanyahu and his rogues’ gallery cabinet that they cannot starve innocent civilians as part of their campaign against Hamas, and that if they do not cut it out there will be hell to pay. But Biden is in the tank for the Israeli government. He keeps talking about knowing Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, and though neither was, let us say, nice to Palestinians, they were not genocidal maniacs in the mold of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Biden may or may not be up to the job of the presidency in general, but he certainly is not up to dealing with Netanyahu, whom he has literally enabled to get away with murder (tens of thousands of murders). And Secretary of State Antony Blinken has all the sympathy for the human rights of Palestinians that Henry Kissinger had for those of the Cambodians, East Timorese or the Chileans.
Al Jazeera English Video: “US built aid pier scrapped as parts of Gaza starve”
The pier is gone, but the aid requirements remain. This week a group of United Nations special rapporteurs and other experts said that “The recent deaths of more Palestinian children due to hunger and malnutrition leaves no doubt that famine has spread across the entire Gaza strip.”
They pointed to the documented deaths of three Palestinian from malnutrition, saying, “With the death of these children from starvation despite medical treatment in central Gaza, there is no doubt that famine has spread from northern Gaza into central and southern Gaza.”
Nor, they argue, is this outcome, of stick-thin little kids expiring from Israeli abuse an accident. They write, “We declare that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza. We call upon the international community to prioritise the delivery of humanitarian aid by land by any means necessary, end Israel’s siege, and establish a ceasefire.”
World Health Organization leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus likewise weighed in on Thursday, saying, that 74 aid trucks destined for Gaza are stalled at the Rafah crossing or in Ismailia.
The Israeli military has seized the Egyptian checkpoint at Rafah and is declining to let aid enter there, in contravention of the 1978 Camp David Peace Treaty.
Dr. Hanan Balkhy, the director of the World Health Organization for the Eastern Mediterranean region, is recently back from an 11-day visit to Gaza and the West Bank. She reported “running sewage and garbage in the demolished streets and the smell of fermented waste permeating the air,” saying, “This situation is providing the perfect breeding ground for diseases to spread, leading to an increase in cases of acute watery diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections among many others.” She spoke of a breakdown in law and order that makes it difficult to distribute food and medical supplies, and hinted at widespread violence and rape.
Hundreds of Palestinians needing dialysis or radiation treatment for cancer are thought to have died since the Israeli campaign began.
WHO says that there are at least 10,000 patients in Gaza with conditions, including cancer and severe malnutrition, that cannot be treated under current conditions in the Strip, and who need to be evacuated abroad immediately.