President Joe Biden announced a new idea for his administration to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza, beyond the $350 million taxpayer dollars that had earlier been committed to the Palestinian enclave, during his March 2024 State of the Union Address.
The Biden-Harris administration's brilliant idea was to introduce a temporary pier to the Gaza seacoast to transfer aid collected in Cyprus to Gaza. Biden announced that the U.S. Army would construct the pier but that there would be “no boots on the ground” to offload the aid or to deliver it to Gazans. No U.S. service members would be put in harm’s way to deliver the aid. He surmised that the temporary pier would “enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.” Estimates were that the aid increase would mean an additional 500,000 people would receive assistance for three months. Still, no data, estimates, or evidence of need were presented to substantiate the claims of his plan.
Before the ink was dry on the State of the Union address, aid experts knew it was doomed to fail. Humanitarian aid was already being looted regularly by Hamas, no third-country security force was willing to protect the aid deliveries, and a temporary pier in Gaza had not previously been conceived earlier because the engineering was too complex on the Mediterranean Sea coast. All of this was suddenly being planned while Hamas terrorists remained encamped in civilian and UN facilities from which they regularly fired arms and missiles at Israeli troops and occasional aid convoys.
Team Biden-Harris’s magical mystery pier idea seemed to have come out of thin air, a deus ex machina that would suddenly solve all the problems in Gaza. The fantasized number of people it would serve also came out of the blue. It seems, too, that the money to cover the cost of the pier would be beamed up to the bridge of the Starship BidenPrise with the push of a fancy button. But here’s the ugly truth: the magic of inflation and tax increases for American citizens enabled their $230 million “if you build it, they will come” vision.
What someone forgot to remind the Biden-Harris administration was the reason for the perceived need for this pier in the first place - Hamas terrorists and so-called civilians from Gaza flooded into Israel by land, sea, and air on October 7, 2023. They massacred over 1,200 Israelis and stole 256 people as hostages, including women, children, men, and the elderly – including Holocaust survivors. They raped and brutalized women, men, girls, and boys. They maniacally attacked Israel, and Israel declared war. War ain’t pretty. Hamas is worse. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with their advisers at the State Department, USAID, and the National Security Council, wanted to wave a magic wand and have a solution. Indeed, Biden was so desperate to show any level of competence in foreign affairs and to placate his party’s radical base that he was willing to try anything. Even if the “anything” was stupid, costly, and dangerous. Which it was.
The Army had the temporary pier built by May and initially attempted to offload 12 truckloads of humanitarian aid: food, shelter, and medicine. The trucks were immediately attacked, and most of the aid was stolen by Hamas terrorists and “Palestinian civilians.” Predictably, choppy seas hampered further operations, and then everything got worse; the pier became disconnected from shore, had to be repaired, cost an additional $22 million, got caught up in bad weather, and aid workers were able to unload only one further aid shipment onto a Gaza beach. Even as that aid was unloaded, no aid workers could deliver it to UN World Food Programme warehouses, and it sat on the beach for three weeks. It was looted, of course, by Hamas, and three weeks later, only a small portion of aid was retrieved by the UN.
From the start of plans to move aid into Gaza through the pier, the UN complained that there was no security for the shipments. No third country offered to send security forces to guard the pier or its precious cargo. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in the middle of a righteous war against barbaric terrorists, was pressed into guarding the aid. In the process, Hamas terrorists attacked the pier, and two IDF soldiers were murdered, all so Biden could placate keffiyeh-clad college radicals.
In July, the Biden-Harris administration called it quits and announced the pier operation would end. Total cost: Over $250 million in construction fees, countless hundreds of millions of humanitarian aid, and two Israeli souls. The population that was served by this boondoggle was Hamas.
The final nail in the pier’s coffin came in an evaluation report issued on August 27, 2024, by the USAID Office of the Inspector General, the Agency’s internal watchdog. The Inspector General was kind; he blamed the weather and security considerations. However, underlying everything in his 20-page evaluation is the recognition that a poorly designed plan that is poorly executed stands little chance of success. Such was the case with the Biden-Harris Gaza pier.
There’s a common saying in Washington that “you can’t get rid of a temporary government program.” The fever dream of building the temporary pier in Gaza proved aphorism false.
Bonnie Glick served as the Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development under President Donald J. Trump.
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