The pressure from the United States on Israel is increasing, while Gazans suffer from a lack of food due to lack of humanitarian aid. To compensate for the blocking of aid by Israel, Joe Biden announced, this Thursday, March 7 during his speech to Congress, a major operation to deliver more aid to the Gaza Strip, while hopes of a truce rapid relations between the Israeli army and Palestinian Hamas are diminishing.
The American president once again called for an “immediate ceasefire” of six weeks in Gaza, and announced that he wanted to build a port in the enclave, in order to allow hundreds of trucks loaded with aid to be transported there by sea. “Tonight, I am ordering U.S. armed forces to conduct an emergency mission to establish a temporary port on the coast of Gaza that can accommodate large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelter,” he indicated.
A floating pontoon, without troops on the ground
In practice, this would involve the implementation of a floating pontoon, which would be built from American ships, then moved close to the coast and connected to a sort of temporary causeway, indicates The New York Times. The construction of a “temporary pier” will take several weeks and does not involve the deployment of American soldiers on the ground, American officials explained, specifying that the Israelis had been informed.
The port will allow the equivalent of “hundreds of trucks of additional aid” to arrive in Gaza each day, according to US officials. The maritime aid will leave, according to them, from the port of Larnaca in Cyprus, the European Union country geographically closest to Gaza, where the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is expected on Friday. There, security inspections should be carried out by Israel before the aid leaves, according to the BBC. “With Gaza having no deep-water port, the United States has been seeking ways to urgently deliver aid shipments for weeks, and the administration has publicly increased its pressure and increasingly publicly demonstrated his impatience with Israel, in the face of the desperate situation on the ground,” explains the British channel.
Map showing the port of Larnaca, Cyprus, as well as the Palestinian territories and Israel.
© / AFP
The risk of helping too late
According to the Hamas health ministry, at least 20 civilians, most of them children, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in recent days. The situation is particularly critical in the north where the delivery of aid by land is almost impossible due to fighting, destruction and looting.
A sign of an alarming situation, a distribution of humanitarian aid on February 29 in Gaza City (north) turned into chaos with Israeli fire on a hungry crowd and a stampede, which left 115 dead according to Hamas, a toll that ‘no independent source is able to verify.
But questions remain. If the Americans indicated that they had informed Israel about the construction of such a port, “the Israeli government did not immediately confirm that it had authorized the entry of the aid”, notes the New York Times. Furthermore, warns the American daily, the delivery of aid by sea will “not directly solve the central problem, namely that trucks cannot deliver their goods due to the intensity of Israeli bombings and land fighting “.
In recent days, several countries including the United States, France and the Netherlands have delivered humanitarian aid via airdrops. Still insufficient, according to the UN and the World Food Program.