US completes construction of Gaza pier as Israel occupies Rafah crossing

The US military has completed construction of its Gaza pier, but weather conditions mean it is currently unsafe to move the two-part facility into place, the Pentagon said.

"As of today, the construction of the two portions of the JLOTS — the floating pier and the Trident pier — are complete an d awaiting final movement offshore," Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told journalists on Tuesday, using an acronym for Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore — the official name for the pier capability.

"Today there are still forecasted high winds and high sea swells, which are causing unsafe conditions for the JLOTS components to be moved. So the pier sections and military vessels involved in its construction are still positioned at the port of Ashdod," in Israel, Singh said.

US Central Command "stands by to move the pier into position in the near future," she added.

The US says the pier — which the US military started building last month and which will cost at least $320 million — is aimed at boosting deliveries of desperately needed humanitarian assistance to Gaza, which has been ravaged by seven months of Israeli war on the besieged Palestinians.

UN officials have said this is no substitute for land routes into Gaza that Israel is controlling while holding up deliveries of assistance by ground.

Crossings closed

The vessels and the under-construction pier were moved to the port due to bad weather last week. Once the weather clears, the pier will be anchored to the Gaza shore by Israeli military, keeping US troops off the ground.

US says aid will then be transported via commercial vessels to a floating platform off the Gaza coast, where it will be transferred to smaller vessels, brought to the pier, and taken to land by truck for distribution.

Plans for the pier were first announced by US President Joe Biden in early March as Israel held up deliveries of assistance by ground, and US Army troops and vessels soon set out on a lengthy trip to the Mediterranean to build the pier.

Some two months later, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire. The United Nations said on Tuesday that Israel had denied it access to the Rafah crossing — the key entry point for aid into the territory.

The White House said the closing of Rafah and the other main crossing, Karem Abu Salem, was "unacceptable" and needed to be reversed.

At the heart of war

Gaza's bloodiest-ever war broke out following Hamas' unprecedented October 7 blitz on Israel, which the Palestinian resistance group says was orchestrated in response to daily Israeli attacks on Al Aqsa Mosque, illegal settler violence in occupied West Bank and to put Palestine question "back on the table."

The hours-long raid and Israeli military's haphazard reaction resulted in the killing of more than 1,130 people, Israeli officials and local media say. Palestinian fighters also took more than 250 hostages and presently 130 remain in Gaza, including 34 who the Israeli army says are dead, some of them killed in indiscriminate Israeli strikes.

Israel has since then killed at least 34,789 Palestinians — 70 percent of them babies, children and women — and wounded over 78,204 while some 10,000-plus Palestinians are feared buried under debris of bombed homes amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.

Israel has imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza, leaving its population, particularly residents of northern Gaza, starving. The Israeli war has pushed some 90 percent of Gaza's population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 65 percent of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed.

Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice and by the Islamic bloc of 57 countries — Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, says there are reasonable grounds to believe Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.