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President Joe Biden’s military pier installed for a short time off the coast of Gaza last year lacked basic planning and was far more dangerous to U.S. soldiers than previously known, a new report finds.
The Department of Defense Inspector General has found in an investigation that 62 of the 1,000 U.S. military members carrying out the ill-fated operation were injured, with one person, a 23-year-old sergeant, later dying from his injuries. The report says that it’s unclear whether the injuries were caused by the operation or pre-existing conditions.
Further, the pier, made with the military’s Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) system, caused at least $31 million in damages to U.S. military equipment, the investigation found.
The report compounds upon previous findings that the pier operation failed at its stated mission of delivering aid, as U.S. officials swept aside aid groups’ concerns — and lends credence to skeptics who said that the pier was just a way for the Biden administration to feign concern for Israel’s humanitarian catastrophe without actually helping Palestinians.
Biden announced that his administration would dispatch the pier — a $230 million endeavor — in March 2024, six months into Israel’s near-total aid blockade in Gaza. Experts had been warning of famine spreading across the Gaza Strip due to the blockade, with Israel’s all-out assault on Gaza backed by U.S. weaponry and diplomacy.
Humanitarian aid groups and analysts said that the pier would be the most expensive and least effective way to deliver aid to the starving, besieged Palestinian population. They also raised concerns that the pier would undercut other established ways to deliver aid and that the most effective way to increase aid delivery was to pressure Israel to end its aid blockade.
But the Biden administration refused to heed warnings from aid groups, even going so far as to outright ignore groups’ safety requirements — making it nearly impossible for aid workers to effectively distribute the aid. Only a fraction of the aid promised made it into Gaza, and much of it spoiled as it sat on the hot beach, not being delivered to the general population.
As the inspector general’s report detailed, poor planning resulted in the pier only being operational for about 20 of the 90 days it was supposed to be attached and running.
When planning the pier operation, officials “did not fully consider mission-specific information requirements, such as beach conditions, average sea states, and other factors that affect the ability to successfully plan and conduct JLOTS operations,” the report said. These very weather conditions forced the military to detach the pier numerous times, until it was finally detached permanently, months earlier than planned.
Meanwhile, officials failed to consider that the Army and Navy equipment being used for the mission were incompatible with each other — perhaps because, as the report says, officials did not establish a “joint standard” for the operation.
As a result, equipment suffered major damages. In one instance, Army watercraft was “punching a bunch of holes” into Navy equipment, the report found; an attached picture showed a large watercraft with massive holes, and the words “total loss” spray painted onto it.
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