Janice R. Andrews
A new USAID inspector general report released on Tuesday shows that President Joe Biden ordered the building of a temporary pier to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza earlier this year, even though staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had a lot of worries. The report says that the plan, which was meant to speed up aid delivery while the war between Israel and Hamas was still going on, ran into a number of problems that made it less successful and took attention away from other important aid lines.
President Biden talked about the temporary pier in his March State of the Union speech. It is actually called the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system (JLOTS). The project, which cost $230 million, was meant to help the people of Gaza right away because they were having a hard time getting food and other necessities. The project, on the other hand, could only be used for 20 days and kept failing because of things like bad weather and security problems.
The inspector general report says that some USAID employees were worried that giving priority to the JLOTS pier could hurt efforts to make land routes for aid delivery more efficient. People thought that these land paths would be better than the temporary floating pier for getting food and goods into Gaza. Even with these worries, President Biden’s order lead to a lot of work on the pier, but it wasn’t enough to reach its goals.
At the time the pier was announced, the UN said that over half a million people in Gaza were facing starvation and all of the country’s 2.3 million residents were having trouble finding food. It was the plan of the Biden government to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days from the pier. The project, however, only provided food for about 450,000 people for one month before it ended in July.
There were times when big waves and bad weather made the pier less useful because they often damaged the building. Along with that, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) pulled out of the project after an Israeli relief operation near the pier. Concerns were made about the neutrality of WFP workers after this event, since their work distributing food could be seen as biased in the ongoing war.
A spokesman for the National Security Council named Sean Savett supported the project, saying that despite the problems, the pier had a “real impact” on getting food to Gaza’s needy civilians. Savett said that the U.S. government did everything it could to help with the terrible humanitarian situation in Gaza and that the pier was very important at a very important time.
The watchdog study also brought up problems with the U.S.’s promise to work with the World Food Program. The WFP set certain conditions that the U.S. had to meet. These included putting the pier in northern Gaza and making sure that protection would come from a U.N. member country to keep things neutral. The pier was put in central Gaza instead, allegedly because the Pentagon thought it would be safer that way. The pier was eventually guarded by Israel’s military because the U.S. military couldn’t find a neutral country ready to do this job.
A U.S. source said that USAID took steps to deal with the problem after USAID workers raised concerns about how it might affect other aid efforts. The agency hired more people to handle both the pier operation and the road routes at the same time, so that the different needs of the humanitarian reaction could be met.
As long as the situation in Gaza is very bad, the choices made about how to send aid and how well they work are still being closely looked at. The study clarifies the difficulties and difficulties the U.S. faces while trying to help people in need during a long and unstable war.
