WhatsappThe pier is not temporary or about delivering aid, it’s about giving the terrorists a permanent gateway to the world.
(JNS / Gatestone Institute) Five Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas and President Biden has sent no troops to help them, but in his State of the Union address he promised to send troops to build a pier for Gaza.
The estimated over 1,000 troops will spend as long as two months laboring to build a floating pier in a war zone, under threat of attack, to help transfer aid to the Hamas supporters living in Gaza.
Nothing about this plan makes sense.
The media has taken to falsely claiming that the Arab Muslims occupying parts of Gaza are starving. Vice President Kamala Harris attacked Israel, claiming that she had “seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed.” Social media videos however show the locals gorging themselves on shawarma and other foods in preparation for Ramadan.
But if the Biden administration really believed that Gazans were starving right now, what would be the purpose of spending two months building a pier to deliver aid? A program with a two-month lead time will not help people who are starving right now. It would be a grim joke.
And the pier plan only gets stranger from there.
According to the administration, there will be no “boots on the ground” constructing the pier, and according to a Pentagon spokesman, “It will not be U.S. military personnel that are transporting the aid off of the causeway into Gaza.” So who has the trucks and capability to actually do it?
The United States will build a pier for smaller ships to transfer to a temporary causeway. According to the spokesman, the administration is “coordinating with other nations to assist with operating the causeway and distributing aid into Gaza.”
Who are those nations? They’re clearly not Israel or the United States. While the Pentagon spokesman mentions Israel as a partner nation, the Israelis are already able to deliver aid.
The Pentagon spokesman mentioned the United Nations and nameless “ally and partner nations.”
“Why not just use those existing ports and have Israel look at what’s going through and bring it in? It seems like this is a lot of work for 60 days out when there are people starving, frankly,” one reporter asked.
And the spokesman responded with a confusing word salad because he had no good answer.
The actual answer is that the Biden administration does not really believe that people in Gaza are starving, let alone starving to death, otherwise it would be doing more than air dropping 11,000 meals and promising to have meal delivery running in 60 days.
The temporary pier setup is about bypassing Israel to provide long-term access to Gaza.
While administration officials describe the pier as “temporary,” a senior official also admitted that “we look forward to the port transitioning to a commercially operated facility over time.”
That means it’s not actually meant to be temporary, but rather a permanent port for the terrorists.
The administration claims that it needs this port “to enable humanitarian partners to safely distribute lifesaving aid throughout Gaza,” but the claim that this is about safety makes no sense since it’s not actually providing security for the aid deliveries. A Pentagon spokesman shrugged off the question of whether Hamas might open fire on American forces or the aid deliveries.
“I mean, that’s certainly a risk, again, but if Hamas truly does care about the Palestinian people, then again, one would hope that this international mission to deliver aid to people who need it would be able to happen unhindered,” he argued. Is Biden still hoping that Hamas cares?
The Pentagon spokesman emphasized, however, that American forces would not be on the ground, would not be in a position to secure the aid deliveries or stop Hamas from taking them.
So what we know about the temporary pier to safely deliver supplies into Gaza is that it’s not temporary and the administration is taking no responsibility for the safety of the aid deliveries.
So what is the permanent pier actually for?
Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS), the Navy-Army capability exercised here, has as its goal the deployment of “LOTS assets to deploy and sustain a force” overcoming the lack of port facilities or “port denial.” Israel certainly has ports, so the issue then is port denial.
The Biden administration claims that it personally will not put troops on the ground in Gaza, but there’s no word on whether other nations might do so. The Pentagon has claimed that security arrangements are still being discussed with partner nations. And some of those partner nations could include Hamas allies like Qatar or Turkey. Any armed foreign nation entering Gaza would amount to an invasion of Israeli territory with the ultimate aim of aiding the terrorists living on it.
There is no reason to assume that moving troops is a primary goal here, but certainly ending Israel’s blockade of Gaza is. Beyond any immediate provision of humanitarian aid, the causeway will be inevitably used to move supplies for the “reconstruction” of Gaza as part of a new “Palestinian state.”
The Biden administration is creating a gateway to Gaza that Israel isn’t supposed to control.
The Trojan pier is not only about bypassing Israel, but also Egypt. The administration’s vision is that the new arrangement will allow it to directly move materials into Gaza without having to get permission from either Israel or Egypt. And that’s a major victory for the terrorists.
Currently, the Israeli military is saying that it will coordinate the construction and inspect the cargo being transferred into Gaza, but that is yet another mistake in a series of them. Once the system is in place and if Israel has been pressured into withdrawing, it gives the terrorists a direct connection to their allies on the outside. And that includes so-called humanitarian groups.
Biden’s actions are a violation of Israel’s sovereignty. After a decade and a half of trying to bottle up Hamas after the group seized power due to Condoleezza Rice’s push for elections, Biden has decided to uncork the bottle. And while that’s bad for Israel, it’s also bad for America.
The last quarter-century has been a series of painful lessons in the cost of trying to win the hearts and minds of Islamic terrorists. Having learned nothing from Afghanistan and Iraq, Biden is bent on repeating the same lunatic experiment by “flooding” Gaza with aid and rebuilding it. If he’s hoping for gratitude, the locals throwing U.S. aid packages in the trash aren’t showing it.
Nor will they.
The United States spent American lives bailing out Iraqi Shi’ites and Syrian Sunnis only to have them kill Americans. Obama’s “Arab Spring” toppled Yemen’s government and turned the Red Sea into a terror zone for international shipping. The Iran Deal gave the terror regime in Tehran billions of dollars that it used to wage war across the region. And the Biden administration helped negotiate the deals to appease Hamas that led directly to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
After all that, the Biden administration wants to open up Gaza to the rest of the world.
If this latest treasonous episode of nation building succeeds, the Israelis will pay the price, but so will all of us. The “Trojan pier” is not about delivering aid, it’s about giving the terrorists a gateway to the world. And when that gateway is in place, the world will burn even faster.
Originally published by The Gatestone Institute.
