US military Gaza pier damaged, aid deliveries suspended

The US military’s makeshift pier, which had been set up to bring additional humanitarian aid to Gaza, was damaged, leading to a temporary suspension of aid efforts, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

The U.S. military’s Joint Logistics Over The Shore (JLOTS) pier officially began operations last week. The pier was built with the intention of providing much-needed assistance in a humanitarian crisis sparked by the war between Israel and Hamas, which began after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7.

“Four U.S. Army ships supporting the maritime humanitarian assistance mission in Gaza were impacted by heavy seas, causing these motorized pier sections used to stabilize the Trident Pier to become detached from their anchors due to a power failure and subsequently stranded on shore,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Tuesday.

Two of the army ships that broke loose ran aground on Israel’s coast near Ashkelon. One has already been recovered and the other will be recovered in the next 24 hours, Singh said.

The two remaining vessels that were stranded near the Trident pier are expected to be recovered in the next 48 hours with the help of the Israeli navy. Over the next two days, the pier, which is anchored off the Gaza coast, will be removed and towed by CENTCOM officials to Ashdod for repairs, Singh said.

“There was an unfortunate, one-off sequence of events involving high seas and another storm that resulted in the JLOTS becoming inoperable for that period,” Singh said.

Some of the US aid is already being loaded onto ships in Cyprus so that the aid will be ready for “immediate unloading” when they dock again at the pier, she said.

“The reconstruction and repair of the pier will take at least a week. After completion, it will have to be anchored back to the Gaza coast,” Singh said. “After completion of the pier work, repair and reconstruction, the temporary pier will be anchored back to the Gaza coast and humanitarian assistance will resume to the people who need it most.”

The setback at JLOTs is the latest problem for the pier project, which has already left three US soldiers injured – two slightly and one still in critical condition. The temporary pier was announced after international humanitarian airdrops left several people dead and aid convoys on the ground remain restricted.

Since aid deliveries began via the pier on Friday, more than 1,000 tons of humanitarian supplies have been delivered to the assembly area for distribution by humanitarian organizations to the Gaza population, Singh said. In early May, CENTCOM said the U.S. had airdropped nearly 1,220 tons of humanitarian aid to date.

According to USAID, the aid packages provided by the United States include nutritious food, plastic sheeting for shelter, jerry cans for clean water and hygiene kits.

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“This humanitarian maritime corridor alone is not enough to meet the enormous needs in Gaza, but it is an important complement. It is intended to complement, not replace, the land crossings into Gaza,” said Daniel Dieckhaus, director of the Levant Response Management Team at the U.S. Agency for International Development, at a briefing at the Pentagon on Friday.

In the past two weeks, fewer than 100 trucks carrying humanitarian aid have reached the Gaza Strip each day. This is “far less than the 600 needed each day to address the looming famine,” USAID officials said in a press release.

Last week, officials raised security concerns related to the distribution of aid, including “potential looting along a pre-agreed distribution route” and a recent Hamas drone attack on Israeli forces that “led to the temporary closure of humanitarian convoys around Gaza for security reasons,” Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, said Friday.

While the US has pledged not to deploy ground troops in Gaza, Israeli media published photos of US soldiers on Israeli beaches where a ship washed ashore. These beaches are located north of Ashdod, a city in Israel about halfway between the Gaza Strip and Tel Aviv.

The JLOTS concept is not new to the U.S. military. In 2023, the Army deployed JLOTS in an international exercise with Australia called Talisman Sabre to practice military logistics in the event of conflict in the Asia-Pacific region. Soldiers also used a JLOTS pier to deliver humanitarian aid to Haiti in 2010.

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