Biden HIDING COSTLY GAZA PIER PROBLEM
The U.S. military has begun to close the extremely costly and problematic pier into the Gaza Strip, citing distribution issues as a major contributing factor in the decision.
“In President Biden’s opinion, this chapter may be closed, but the shame this endeavor has brought onto the country has not. “The only miracle is that no American lives were lost during this doomed-from-the-start operation,” Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, stated in a statement following the project’s closure. “I have been calling for an end to this election-year gimmick since its primetime inception at the State of the Union.”
“While I am glad it has finally concluded, we cannot buy back the $230 million needlessly spent, and significant questions remain about the Biden administration’s poor planning for this mission,” Wicker stated.
President Biden promised to build a temporary pier in the Mediterranean Sea off the shore of the Gaza Strip during his State of the Union address in March. This will help increase the supply of humanitarian goods to the region, where millions of people are still displaced as Israel pursues Hamas. The piers, one of which would remain several miles offshore and the other serving as a causeway onto the Gazan shore, were finished on May 9 but encountered difficulties during deployment over the course of the next week, according to a statement released by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon predicted that building the pier would cost about $230 million, and numerous members of Congress openly criticized the endeavor: The operation turned out to be a “dangerous effort with marginal benefit,” Wicker previously told Reuters.
In an interview with Fox News Digital in May, Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., stated that the initiative was “unnecessarily putting our people in harm’s way.” “It is really expensive. I simply don’t think it will accomplish nearly what he has promised. It’s taking resources that could be spent elsewhere.” In the early weeks of June, the U.N. stopped delivery from the dock, stating that a “thorough assessment of the security situation… to ensure the safety of our staff and our partners” was necessary.
“There’s no more need to use the pier, particularly since we’re able to implement a more sustaining pathway, to Ashdod,” Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, Deputy Commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters during an off-camera/on-record briefing on Wednesday. “The maritime storage mission involving the pier is complete.”
“The main challenge we have right now in Gaza is around the insecurity and lawlessness that is hampering the distribution once aid gets into Gaza, into the crossing points,” stated Sonali Korde, Assistant to the Administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. Now that the pier project seems to have run its course, humanitarian aid will be sent into Gaza via a wholly civilian-managed sea corridor in Cyprus and Ashdod.
Cooper said: “We’ve started using this new hybrid route between the sea and land in the last several weeks to get supplies from Cyprus to the port of Israel, then into north Gaza through the U.N. and WFP. And it has yielded success.”
“Israel has been fully supportive of this effort, and in the last several weeks, we’ve successfully delivered more than 1 million pounds of aid into Gaza via this route,” Cooper stated.
All inquiries were forwarded by the White House to press conferences and gaggles that are taking place today, where Deputy State Spox Vedant Patel justified the choice to go forward with the pier project and asserted that the operation was ultimately successful. “We believe that this effort was successful, and, specifically, because the peer and its existence and the work that happened through it impacted aid delivery to northern Gaza,” Patel stated. Millions of pounds worth of aid were successfully supplied to those in need by it. As I indicated, about 19 million were used, and this served to improve overall the situation in northern Gaza and increase the flow of aid.”
“Not at all to say that the situation is resolved or conclusive or anything like that, but overall, it was an effort that we believe was successful,” he said.
