The US military anchored a temporary dock on the coast of Gaza on Thursday, creating an entry point for humanitarian aid to the enclave, where the flow of supplies across land borders has largely stopped since Israel began its incursion. in Rafah last week.
The aid will be loaded onto trucks that will begin moving ashore “in the coming days,” US Central Command said. in a sentence Thursday morning. U.S. officials had said last week that the floating dock and causeway were completed, but that weather conditions had delayed their installation.
Israel has long opposed a seaport for Gaza, saying it would pose a security threat. As the humanitarian crisis in the territory has escalated in recent months, with severe shortages of food, medicine and other basic needs, the US military announced in March a plan to build a temporary dock to allow aid shipments through of the Mediterranean Sea.
A US ship loaded with humanitarian aid, the Sagamore, left for Gaza from Cyprus last week, and the aid was loaded onto a smaller ship that had been waiting for the dock to be set up. The United Nations will receive the aid and oversee its distribution in Gaza, according to Central Command, which said no American troops would set foot in the territory.
Over the next two days, U.S. military and humanitarian groups will attempt to load three to five trucks from the dock and ship them to Gaza as a test of the process established by the Pentagon, said Gen. Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“It will probably take another 24 hours to make sure everything is ready,” he told reporters Thursday aboard a flight to Brussels, where he was attending a NATO meeting. “We have our protection force that has been deployed, we have contracted truckers on the other side, and there is fuel for those truckers as well.”
The Pentagon expects the dock’s operation to generate enough support for about 90 trucks per day, a number that will increase to 150 trucks when the system reaches full operational capacity, officials say.
In a briefing on Thursday, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said supporting the temporary dock project was a “top priority.” He said the Israeli Navy and the 99th Division were supporting the effort by sea and land, respectively.
Aid groups say the devastation in Gaza after seven months of Israeli bombing, strict Israeli inspections and restrictions at crossing points are limiting the amount of aid that can enter Gaza. Israel has maintained that the restrictions are necessary to ensure that no weapons or supplies fall into the hands of Hamas.
The United Nations World Food Program said on Wednesday it had not received any aid through the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel in southern Gaza since May 6, when Israeli troops began a military operation in the area. close to the city of Rafah. The agency said in a statement that access to its warehouse in Rafah had been cut off due to the fighting and that its food and fuel stocks would run out “within days.”
“The threat of famine in Gaza has never been greater,” the agency said, adding that Israel’s operations in Rafah had significantly delayed efforts to alleviate the humanitarian crisis for the enclave’s 2.2 million residents.
In a briefing Wednesday, Dan Dieckhaus, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, stressed that the maritime aid corridor was intended to complement deliveries through land crossings, not replace them.
The Pentagon has said the dock could help deliver up to two million meals a day.
An aid group, World Central Kitchen, built a makeshift jetty in mid-March to deliver aid by sea to Gaza for the first time in nearly two decades. But those efforts came to an abrupt halt in early April after seven of the group’s workers were killed in an Israeli strike.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Helen Cooper contributed reports.