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In planning the D-Day invasion of 1944, which helped turn the tide of the Second World War, Allied forces preparing to cross the English Channel faced a near-insurmountable engineering and logistics problem: how to rapidly supply an invading force with thousands of tons of supplies and equipment daily on the beaches of Normandy, France.
They devised an innovative solution — Mulberry harbors, two prefabricated concrete and steel harbors floated in sections from Britain to France to serve as deep-water ports.
Eighty years later, President Biden’s plan to build a temporary port to supply aid to Gaza recalls the effort at Normandy, my colleague Michael E. Ruane writes.
But one key difference stands out: The Gaza Strip is surrounded by existing routes, in the care of staunch U.S. allies, by which a massive increase in aid could feasibly arrive by truck.
The United States must carry out an “emergency mission” to get more aid into Gaza as it faces an “intolerable humanitarian crisis,” Biden said in his State of the Union address last week. At least 31,341 people have been killed and 73,134 injured in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and aid groups warn of a hunger crisis and imminent famine.
But in undertaking this resource-heavy endeavor, set to require 1,000 troops and two months, at a cost that remains to be tallied, alongside expensive and inefficient aid delivery by airdrops — the United States is not circumventing forbidding geography. It is pursuing a logistically complicated workaround to what analysts say is a fundamentally simple problem: Getting aid into Gaza by land.
For months, aid groups have urged Israel to allow more trucks into Gaza. Trucks already packed sit idle on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing but trickle through at a fraction of prewar levels. Before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, some 500 trucks entered Gaza daily. February saw seven days where 20 trucks or less crossed the border into the enclave, according to U.N. data.
Israel maintains that it places no limits on the amount of aid that it will allow into Gaza, laying blame instead on the United Nations for slow deliveries. But the Rafah crossing from Egypt and the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel are insufficiently handling the volume of aid required, according humanitarian organizations, my colleague Claire Parker reports. The Israeli inspection process remains cumbersome and opaque, with items rejected on a seemingly “random” basis, Janti Soeripto, chief executive of Save the Children, told The Washington Post.
Drawing in part on field research conducted within the region, Refugees International, a U.S.-based humanitarian organization, issued a report this month finding that Israeli restrictions had “obstructed humanitarian action at every step of the aid delivery process” by seemingly arbitrary denials of legitimate humanitarian goods entering Gaza; a highly complicated and inconsistent inspection process; frequent denials of internal humanitarian movements; and attacks on humanitarian and critical infrastructure, among other policies “causing a man-made humanitarian crisis.”
Biden, too, has urged Israel to facilitate the crossing of more trucks. But he has pursued routes to provide aid, critics say, that attempt to surmount by sea and air a political problem more likely to be resolved by diplomatic leverage.
The fact that experts who have delivered aid time and again in protracted conflicts, including Syria and Yemen, cannot scale an aid operation inside Gaza is “representative of the impediments in place that are restricting and straining the scaling of the humanitarian operation,” said Jesse Marks, senior advocate for the Middle East for Refugees International, who worked on the report.
The Biden administration’s adoption of last-resort options, such as airdrops and maritime corridors, shows “the severity of the crisis inside of Gaza — and the belief that if there is no aid, that the famine conditions are going to worsen,” Marks said.
Sixty days of waiting for the construction of a pier — to respond to imminent famine — could mean too little, too late. “People in Gaza don’t have two months. They’re starving now,” Marks said.
Just five trucks of the hundreds waiting to cross could be capable of bringing in more than 100 tons of food parcels immediately, according to ReliefWeb.
“There’s probably somewhere between twenty to fifty times what that first boat is going to bring in, and it is sitting in trucks at the border,” Sean Carroll, the president of American Near East Refugee Aid, told the New Yorker.
“There is kind of a craziness to this: the U.S. is announcing the building of the pier in order to get more aid in, because we’re failing to get stuff in the land crossings, which already exist,” he said.
No path into Gaza is without major challenges, especially in getting aid to the battered north. Truck delivery comes with logistical dangers, including ongoing Israeli bombardment. Gazans with desperate levels of need have swarmed loaded trucks, including in the Feb. 29 aid convoy tragedy in which more 100 people were killed, Palestinian officials said. Looting has also increased. But aid delivery by other means faces the same issues at higher cost. The U.S. pier plan will have to work out a process of unloading, sorting and distribution under similarly dire conditions.
The international community sometimes sees desperation driving violence as an obstacle to aid, when it should be understood “the other way around,” Carroll told the New Yorker. “If you actually do a surge on food aid, you can tamp down that desperation and that violence.”
Other aid experts said the pier plan is at best a Band-Aid solution and at worst a distraction.
“We need unfettered access through land for humanitarian relief. Anything else makes absolutely no sense,” said Michael Fakhri, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food. The maritime plan is “an insulting performance — and nobody is fooled,” he said.
It makes “absolutely no sense” from a humanitarian perspective or a human rights perspective, Fakhri said. “It makes sense in trying to placate and meet domestic pressure that the current U.S. administration is feeling. This is done to show that the United States is doing something.”
As the source of hundreds of millions of dollars of arms sales during the latest conflict alone, experts suggest that the United States could make a larger impact by exerting more meaningful pressure on Israel to let trucks through, rather than devising alternative routes.
“It takes a choice,” Fakhri said.