The American Humanitarian-Aid Pier Was Doomed to Fail

If Hamas can exercise political control of Gaza by controlling the distribution of humanitarian aid, donors should be striving to make sure food and other supplies stay out of its hands. Unfortunately, the U.S.-built artificial pier, installed off the coast of Gaza to streamline the delivery of aid, did the opposite. This subject is now moot since the pier, which cost over $320 million, broke apart last week and is at least temporarily out of use.

Garrett Exner explains the folly of this endeavor, which is perhaps emblematic of American policy failures:

Delivering aid through a single, floating pier is slow, easily interrupted by bad weather, and, without security on the ground, subject to regular Hamas theft or UNRWA misuse. If the goal of the administration is to deliver as much aid as possible in the shortest timeline, an existing port facility with overland routes to Gaza would be faster, cheaper, and safer for U.S. forces.

The administration’s very building of the pier implies that Israel is withholding aid from Gaza and cannot be trusted to escort American aid into the conflict zone. This plays into fabricated narratives broadcast by Israel’s enemies about attempts deliberately to starve Gazan civilians.

Like the ineffectual aid airdrops before it, the pier has no security mechanism to protect aid once it arrives in Gaza. As of May 25, nearly all the aid delivered had been looted by terrorist organizations; the Department of Defense admitted that none of the aid has reached the Palestinian people, and what little does is often sold to them by terrorists at exorbitant prices.

This has caused the administration to begin quietly defying Congress by resuming aid delivery to UNRWA, the UN entity in Gaza, which was paused after it was revealed that hundreds of UNRWA workers participated in the massacres of October 7th.

Read more at Providence

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, U.S. Foreign policy

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023