The Gaza Pier Is a $320 Million Symbol of the Biden Administration’s “Ineffectiveness”

On July 11, US officials announced that the pier it funded and built to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza would be dismantled. CIP executive vice president Matt Duss discussed this announcement and what it says about the Biden administration’s Israel/Palestine policy with Mother Jones’ Sophie Hurwitz:

The pier was more of “a way for the Biden Administration to try to look busy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), than an actual solution.

“I don’t ever want to diminish efforts to get more humanitarian aid to people who desperately need it,” Duss continued. “But there were other things the administration should have been doing to facilitate the delivery of aid that they…continue to refuse to do. [The pier] is essentially a physical symbol of this administration’s ineffectiveness around this war.”

[…]

The pier’s months of shutdowns and breakdowns made food aid delivery haphazard at best. And, as Duss explained, the deliveries that do make it into Gaza are difficult to distribute due to the sheer scale of infrastructure demolition, as well as the ongoing bombings. Smaller amounts of food aid are still being delivered through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, but news reports say that aid is piling up on the Gaza side of the border without making it to those who need it.

“The problem wasn’t just that people weren’t getting enough aid…it’s that the amount of actual physical destruction in Gaza, which is enormous, just makes it nearly impossible to deliver that aid,” Duss said. “This is done with the complete support of the United States.”

Read the full piece in Mother Jones.