Rough seas remain a concern, but officials anticipate a better stretch for a couple of months.
“Weather has always been a factor in military operations,” Cooper said. “As we do around the world every day, we will adjust to the weather as required.”
With more than a million Palestinians facing famine, aid deliveries over the pier began May 16 under duress and behind schedule because of bad weather. Sections of the steel pier were damaged May 25 by waves upward of five feet. The mission was suspended days later when the structure broke apart.
U.S. troops transported its pieces to the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, and have spent more than a week reassembling it. The Pentagon assessed that the pier suffered at least $22 million in damage, defense officials said.
Cooper declined to specify what U.S. forces will do if rough seas again present a threat, saying that the units involved “have a series of contingency plans.” The floating pier is connected to land with a steel causeway. Such missions have had an enduring limitation of operating in seas that are no more than two to three feet high, according to several past assessments in U.S. military journals.
Days before the mission was halted, four U.S. Army vessels supporting the mission ran aground, and a separate accident at sea — which the Pentagon has yet to fully explain — left a U.S. service member severely injured. The service member remained in critical condition as of Friday at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, Cooper said.
About 1,000 tons of aid were delivered over the pier before the mission was paused.
Critics say President Biden’s embrace of this approach — and the challenges that go with it — underscore how he and his top advisers have failed to exert enough pressure on Israel to enable more aid deliveries by opening additional land crossings into Gaza.
Some Democrats in Congress, aghast at the death and suffering wrought by eight months of war, have urged Biden to take more aggressive measures — such as withholding U.S. arms transfers to the Israeli government — to force an end to the crisis.
Other critics have charged that the pier mission puts U.S. personnel at risk of attack by Hamas or other militant groups.
Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.), the Senate Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, said it is “astonishing that President Biden is doubling down on this bad idea.” The operation, he said in a statement Friday, “continues to put U.S. troops in harm’s way without any plan for ensuring that aid is delivered successfully to Gazans in need.”
“This irresponsible and expensive experiment defies all logic except the obvious political explanation: to appease the President’s far-left flank,” Wicker said. “This needs to end immediately.”
Cooper said Friday that a U.S. policy remains in effect prohibiting American personnel from operating in Gaza, and the protection of U.S. service members is a top priority. It was Israeli forces on the beach who reconnected the pier, and the aid is trucked over the structure by contract employees and distributed on land by United Nations’ local affiliate.
Administration officials have agreed that more land crossings need to be opened, but said they are pursuing every option to help civilians caught in the crossfire, including the pier and airdrops by U.S. cargo planes.
“Why wouldn’t we try this?” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week. “If we had this capability, and it was available to us, we have the know-how and the expertise to do it, why would we leave that on the sidelines?”
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which has partnered on the project with the Pentagon, said in a statement late Thursday that it remains in close contact with colleagues from across the U.S. government and humanitarian partners to ensure aid deliveries can safely and effectively resume from the pier.
“Additionally, USAID continues to work with partners to get aid into and across Gaza through existing land routes,” the statement said. “We continue to push for crossings into Gaza to remain predictably, consistently functional at maximum capacity, and that internal access be improved so that aid can reach people in desperate need.”
