First aid from U.S. pier reaches Palestinians, U.N. says

The U.N. World Food Program said Wednesday that it has handed out in Gaza in recent days a “limited number” of high-energy biscuits that arrived from a U.S.-built pier, the first aid from the new humanitarian sea route to get into the hands of Palestinians.

The small number of biscuits came in the first shipments unloaded from the pier Friday, WFP spokesman Steve Taravella said. The U.S. Agency for International Development told The Associated Press that a total of 41 trucks loaded with aid from the more than $320 million pier have reached humanitarian organizations in Gaza.

“Aid is flowing” from the pier, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Wednesday in response to questions about the troubled launch of aid deliveries from the maritime project. “It is not flowing at a rate that any of us are happy with.”

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters Tuesday that he did not believe any of the aid from the pier had yet reached people in Gaza. Sullivan said a day later that some aid had been delivered “specifically to the Palestinians who need it.”

American officials hope the pier at maximum capacity can bring the equivalent of 150 truckloads of aid to Gaza each day.

Israeli restrictions on land crossings and a surge in fighting have cut deliveries of food and fuel in Gaza to the lowest levels since the first months of the war, international officials say.

Israel’s takeover this month of the Rafah border crossing, a key transit point for fuel and supplies for Gaza, has contributed to bringing aid operations near collapse, the U.N. and relief groups say.

The U.S. pier project to bring aid to Gaza via the Mediterranean Sea has had a troubled launch, with groups of people overrunning a convoy Saturday and taking most of the supplies and a man in the crowd who was shot dead in still-unexplained circumstances.

Saturday’s chaos forced suspension of aid convoys from the pier for two days. Shada Moghraby, the WFP’s spokesperson at the U.N., said trucks carrying aid from the pier arrived at a U.N. warehouse Tuesday and Wednesday, but it wasn’t clear how many.

Israel insists it puts no restriction on the number of trucks entering Gaza and has blamed “lack of logistical capabilities and manpower gaps” among aid groups.

But Israel’s military operations make it very difficult for groups to retrieve the aid.

President Joe Biden ordered the construction of the pier as land crossings into the enclave remained constrained.

Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble since Israel began a campaign against Hamas terrorists over the Oct. 7 assault that killed 1,200 Israelis and led to around 250 being taken as hostages.

Crowds have stopped trucks trying to take aid from the pier to a distribution warehouse, according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric. While 10 trucks were able to take goods from the pier to a storage area on Friday, only five of 16 trucks that departed the dock on Saturday made it to the warehouse, with all the others being halted, he said.

“Crowds had stopped the trucks at various points along the way,” he said. “There was what I think I would refer to as self-distribution. These trucks were traveling through areas where there’d been no aid. I think people feared that they would never see aid. They grabbed what they could.”

The roughly 1,800-foot dock was forecast to be able to bring in an initial 90 truckloads of humanitarian aid into Gaza each day, the Pentagon has said. That amount could increase to about 150 truckloads of supplies per day once the pier is fully operational, the department said.