Biden’s plan to build a pier to deliver aid to Gaza, which he unveiled so proudly in his State of the Union speech, is fatally flawed. “The floating pier plan will fail. Here’s why.” Elder of Ziyon, March 8, 2024:
The World Food Programme acknowledges the danger, which is why it was forced to stop doing it themselves.
On Sunday, as WFP started the route towards Gaza City, the convoy was surrounded by crowds of hungry people close to the Wadi Gaza checkpoint. First fending off multiple attempts by people trying to climb aboard our trucks, then facing gunfire once we entered Gaza City, our team was able to distribute a small quantity of the food along the way. On Monday, the second convoy’s journey north faced complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order. Several trucks were looted between Khan Younes and Deir al Balah and a truck driver was beaten. The remaining flour was spontaneously distributed off the trucks in Gaza city, amidst high tension and explosive anger.
“Spontaneously distributed” means that food aid was grabbed by everyone who could elbow his way to the truck and grab a bag of flour or sugar or some other staple and make off with it before some other desperate soul grabbed it out of his hands.
There have been rumors about an Egyptian truck driver beaten to death trying to bring in aid.
That rumor was true, testimony to the complete breakdown of law and order, since the only force capable of maintaining order, Hamas, was deliberately refusing to do so. It wanted more Gazans to die trying to obtain food, so that the Jews could be blamed.
It isn’t only Hamas trying to frustrate aid to Gazans. The Palestinian Authority already rejected the plan to bring in goods by ship when Cyprus and Israel agreed to that plan in December.
Why did the PA reject last December the same plan that Biden announced in his State of the Union speech in March? The PA didn’t want to help the Gazans, figuring that a complete breakdown of civil order in the Strip would make not just Israel, but also Hamas, look bad, and the PA, far from the chaos and pandemonium, look statesmanlike by comparison.
It is insane that the IDF, which is doing everything possible to feed Gazans under these circumstances, is routinely portrayed as the devil in news stories and NGO reports….
The world appears not to realize that the IDF has placed no limits on the amount of food aid that can be delivered to Gaza every day. The only thing the IDF requires is that it be allowed to check the trucks’ cargos for weapons, weapon parts, and “dual-use” products. If these are not present, the trucks are waved through by the IDF. The mainstream media have made the world think that the IDF is actually preventing food aid from entering Gaza. It is not.
Biden’s floating pier plan, while it would allow more food aid to be delivered to Gaza, still does nothing to solve the logistics problem. Once the food has been taken off the ships and loaded onto trucks waiting at the pier, then what prevents Hamas from hijacking the trucks as they move along the handful of roads in Gaza, removing as much of their food as the men of Hamas feel like taking for themselves and their extended families, and also still more food that they plan to resell at grossly inflated prices, and the trucks then continue on with their now much-diminished cargo? Biden has assured us there will not be any American troops “on the ground” in Gaza. Who then will be given the task of guarding the trucks? Surely not the IDF, which knows it would be blamed for any wild eruption of violence from those grabbing at the food, and blamed even more if it used force to bring order to these thousands of menacing rioters, so that an even distribution of food could take place.
Perhaps a few thousand UN peacekeepers could be put in place to accompany the trucks to places where they would halt, and those peacekeepers could make sure that the food would be distributed in an orderly fashion, to people forming queues instead of violently shoving one another. But Biden said nothing about the need for such a force when he revealed his plan to build a pier. Perhaps he and Antony Blinken need to think a bit harder about what else, aside from the building of that ballyhooed pier, needs to be done. It would be nice if Biden would explain to the world that there is no food shortage in Gaza, but a failure to distribute fairly the food that arrives on trucks every day. Of course, the only sure way to guarantee the proper distribution of food aid in Gaza is to eliminate Hamas which, despite the Bidenites’ best efforts to prevent it, the IDF is well on its way to doing,