2:27 a.m. ET, May 24, 2024
More than 500 metric tons of food and other aid offloaded at the pier has now been handed off to humanitarian partners, and two-thirds of that aid has been distributed to or is in the process of reaching those in need, a top US Agency for International Development (USAID) official said Thursday.
The distribution comes several days after the US military’s pier operation launched and had a rocky start.
Aid deliveries from the pier to warehouses inside Gaza were hindered by a Hamas drone attack on the Israeli military “several miles away” from the pier that led to a freeze on convoy movements, and some trucks were looted along one of the distribution paths, Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of United States Central Command, said.
The US military had to help USAID devise alternative, safer routes for trucks leaving the marshaling area on the beach near the pier and traveling to the warehouses.
“Such challenges with internal distribution are not new or unique to aid delivery from the sea,” Cooper said. “But these atmospherics, I think, give you some sense of the operating environment.”
Remember: More than 1,000 US troops helped to build the humanitarian pier and causeway off the coast of Gaza over the last two months, and the operation launched last week. By Tuesday, however, the Pentagon said that none of the aid that had been unloaded from the pier had been delivered to the broader Palestinian population yet.
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