Most of the aid being delivered to Gaza via the new “floating pier” constructed by the U.S. military is being stolen, according to reports.
The pier, announced by President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address, was completed last week, and the Pentagon said Tuesday that 569 metric tons of aid had been brought ashore thus far.
However, the Pentagon is unable to say how much, if any, of that aid has actually reached the organizations that are supposed to distribute it, as reports have emerged of Palestinians simply seizing aid from the back of delivery trucks.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that “there has been no aid delivered to a U.N. warehouse from a U.S.-built pier for two days.”
It added:
The U.N. said that 10 truckloads of food aid – transported from the pier site by U.N. contractors – were received on Friday at a World Food Programme warehouse in Deir El Balah in Gaza.
But on Saturday, only five truckloads made it to the warehouse after 11 others were cleaned out by Palestinians during the journey through an area that a U.N. official said has been hard to access with humanitarian aid.
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The U.N. did not receive any aid from the pier on Sunday or Monday. “We need to make sure that the necessary security and logistical arrangements are in place before we proceed,” said the U.N. official.
Asked about the situation in a press briefing on Tuesday, Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said it would not be accurate to say that no aid had arrived at all, but he could not explain how the U.S. would guarantee that aid from the pier would be delivered.
“The aid is in the assembly areas on shore, right? So it’s – it’s taken – the – so the military – the U.S. military is delivering it to the causeway,” he said. “It’s then taken by non-U.S. contractors, driven over onto shore, put into an assembly area, which is where the NGOs that are supporting this effort pick it up and take it for onward distribution.”
He could not say how much of the estimated 569 metric tons of aid that had been delivered to the pier had actually been received by aid organizations.
On Wednesday, Israeli government spokesman David Mencer responded to a question from Breitbart News by confirming that most of the aid being delivered via the pier was being
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.