A temporary pier deployed off Gaza's coast will enable aid workers to create the embattled territory's first major maritime corridor for the delivery of humanitarian aid in two decades, the U.S. military said, as a dire shortage of basic supplies pushes the enclave toward famine.
The U.S. Central Command announced on Thursday that trucks carrying aid are expected to begin moving ashore "in the coming days" through the newly established sea route. The United Nations will receive the shipments and coordinate distribution within Gaza.
World Central Kitchen briefly mounted a makeshift jetty in early March that was made of rubble from buildings that had been destroyed by bombs in Gaza, but it was forced to shut that down soon afterward when it halted operations due to the loss of seven of its aid workers in Israeli airstrikes.
No U.S. troops entered Gaza for this latest maritime operation, which initiates the next phase of a US$370 million U.S. plan to rush vital supplies into the blockaded region after seven months of fighting brought aid flows to a virtual halt.
Little aid has entered Gaza since Israeli troops moved into the southern city of Rafah last week, briefly halting the Kerem Shalom crossing and seizing the Rafah crossing, which remains closed.
Over the next two days, a series of small deliveries involving three to five trucks will test the maritime aid corridor before operations scale up. At full capacity, the pier can handle 150 truckloads daily – up to 2 million meals, U.S. officials said.
The sea route is designed to "augment, not replace" aid delivery by land and air, the Pentagon stressed. While more expensive and weather-dependent than ground shipments, it could provide a lifeline to some of Gaza's 2.3 million people as other supply lines remain shut down.
Aid groups estimate that 500 truckloads are needed daily to meet essential needs in Gaza.
Warehouses Empty as Crisis Escalates
The new maritime route comes at a critical juncture for people in Gaza. For weeks, the U.N. and others warned an assault on Rafah could cripple aid operations and cause mass casualties.
The World Food Program and UNRWA – Gaza's main aid suppliers – have been unable to bring in any new aid since Israel seized the Rafah crossing last week.
Food and fuel stocks will run out within days, WFP officials said, adding that "the threat of famine in Gaza never loomed larger.”
The U.N. warned this week that its warehouses in Southern Gaza are out of tents, food and medical stocks. Aid agencies say food is running out in southern Gaza, and dwindling fuel supplies will halt truck deliveries, diminish the capacity to treat saline water and force hospitals to shut down critical operations.
"Time is running out to get a sustainable crossing open for predictable humanitarian supplies into southern Gaza," said Georgios Petropoulos of the U.N.'s Gaza office.
More than 600,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah, according to U.N. estimates, after Israel warned of an offensive on the city where over 1.4 million – half of Gaza's population – had taken shelter, many after previous displacements.
Palestinians sheltering in Rafah have been ordered to the “expanded humanitarian zone” in the small fishing village of Al-Mawasi. Aid groups report conditions in the sprawling encampment are dire: no running water, fuel shortages, scorching heat, and rapidly spreading epidemics of diarrhea and hepatitis A.
Médecins Sans Frontières announced that escalating military action in Rafah had forced its staff and patients to abandon the Rafah Indonesian Field Hospital, one of the last operational healthcare facilities in Gaza.
The closure of crossings at Rafah and Kerem Shalom has left Palestinians requiring medical procedures unavailable in Gaza with nowhere to go.
The timing was not lost on Palestinians who on Wednesday marked the 76th anniversary of Nakba, an Arabic word for catastrophe, signifying their expulsion from lands that are now in Israeli hands. As many as 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes due to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
"There is no catastrophe worse than this one," 80-year-old Umm Mohammed, who survived the original Nakba as a child in the southern town of Beersheba before coming to Gaza, told Reuters. Mohammed, who has spent most of her life in Gaza, now lives in a tent in Rafah.
"I've been here for about 80 years and a catastrophe like this, I have not seen," she said. "Our homes have gone, our children have gone, our property has gone, our gold has gone, our incomes have gone – nothing is left. What is left for us to cry over?"
