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May 10, 2024
1:00 p.m.
Middle East Crisis:
U.N. General Assembly Adopts Resolution Supporting Palestinian Statehood--U.S. Votes NO
Here’s what we know:
The measure declares that Palestinians qualify for full-member status, a largely symbolic move that reflects the growing isolation of Israel.
The U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution in support of Palestinian statehood.
More than 100,000 have fled Rafah, the U.N. says, as Israeli bombardment intensifies.
People leaving Rafah describe yet another fearful flight from Israeli assaults.
U.N. officials warn that aid efforts face imminent threat from lack of fuel.
UNRWA says it closed its headquarters in East Jerusalem after attacks and a fire.
An American aid ship heads toward Gaza, but the system for unloading it still isn’t in place.
The measure declares that Palestinians qualify for full-member status, a largely symbolic move that reflects the growing isolation of Israel.
The U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution in support of Palestinian statehood.
More than 100,000 have fled Rafah, the U.N. says, as Israeli bombardment intensifies.
People leaving Rafah describe yet another fearful flight from Israeli assaults.
U.N. officials warn that aid efforts face imminent threat from lack of fuel.
UNRWA says it closed its headquarters in East Jerusalem after attacks and a fire.
An American aid ship heads toward Gaza, but the system for unloading it still isn’t in place.
A United Nations General Assembly vote to declare that Palestinians qualify for full-member status was approved, 143 to 9, with 25 nations abstaining. Credit: Sarah Yenesel/EPA, via Shutterstock
The United Nations General Assembly on Friday overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring that Palestinians qualify for full-member status at the United Nations, a highly symbolic move that reflects growing global solidarity with Palestinians and is a rebuke to Israel and the United States.
The resolution was approved by a vote of 143 to 9 with 25 nations abstaining. The Assembly broke into a big applause after the vote. The United States voted no.
The resolution was prepared by the United Arab Emirates, the current chair of the U.N. Arab Group. The 193-member General Assembly took on the issue of Palestinian membership after the United States in April vetoed a resolution before the Security Council to recognize full membership for a Palestinian state. The majority of Council members supported the move, but the United States said recognition of Palestinian statehood should be achieved through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
Anger and frustration at the United States has been brewing for months among many senior U.N. officials and diplomats, including allies such as France, because Washington has repeatedly blocked cease-fire resolutions at the Security Council and has staunchly supported Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, even as humanitarian suffering has mounted.
“The U.S. is resigned to having another bad day at the U.N.,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. But he added that the resolution “gives the Palestinians a boost without creating a breakdown over whether they are or are not now U.N. members.”
The U.N. charter stipulates that the General Assembly can only grant full membership to a nation-state after the approval of the Security Council. Examples of that include the creation of the states of Israel and South Sudan. The resolution adopted on Friday explicitly states that the Palestinian issue is an exception and will not set precedent, language that was added during negotiations on the text when some countries expressed concern that Taiwan and Kosovo might follow a similar path to pursue statehood, diplomats said.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N., told the Assembly ahead of the vote that Palestinians’ right to full membership at the U.N. and statehood “are not up for negotiations, they are our inherent rights as Palestinians.” He added that a vote against Palestinian statehood was a vote against the two-state solution.
Still, the resolution does provide new diplomatic perks to Palestinians. Palestinians can now sit among member states in alphabetical order; they can speak at General Assembly meetings on any topic instead of being limited to Palestinian affairs; they can submit proposals and amendments; and they can participate at U.N. conferences and international meetings organized by the Assembly and other United Nations entities.
Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, a sharp critic of the body, said voting for a Palestinian state would be inviting “a state of terror” in its midst and rewarding “terrorists” who killed Jewish civilians with privileges and called member states endorsing it “Jew haters.”
The resolution says that it “determines the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the United Nations,” under its charter rules and recommends that the Security Council reconsider the matter with a favorable outcome.
Nate Evans, the spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said that if the Assembly refers the issue back to the Council, it would have the same outcome again, with the U.S. blocking the move.
The Palestinians are currently recognized by the United Nations as a nonmember observer state, a status granted in 2012 by the General Assembly. They do not have the right to vote on General Assembly resolutions or nominate any candidates to U.N. agencies.
The Assembly session was not without moments of performative drama.
Mr. Gilad. Israel’s ambassador, held up the picture of Hamas’s military leader, Yahya Sinwar, considered the architect of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, with the word “President,” and then a transparent shredder, inserting a piece of paper inside it, and said the member states were “shredding the U.N. charter.”
Mr. Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador, at the end of his speech raised his fist in the air, visibly choking back tears, and said, “Free Palestine.” The Assembly broke into applause.
— Farnaz Fassihi
More than 100,000 have fled Rafah, the U.N. says, as Israeli bombardment intensifies.
Palestinians leaving Rafah on Wednesday following an evacuation order issued by the Israeli Army. Credit: Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
With fears rising that Israel will move ahead with a long-planned full-scale invasion of Rafah, the United Nations said Friday that more than 100,000 people had fled since Israel ordered people to leave parts of the city and intensified a bombardment that Gazan health officials say has killed dozens of people.
As Israeli troops continued to exchange fire with Palestinian fighters near Rafah on Friday, according to both the Israeli military and Hamas, people were packing up their tents and leaving the southern Gazan city and its surrounding areas where more than a million Palestinians had sought shelter in trucks, cars and donkey carts.
Many of them have already been displaced multiple times by the Israel’s war in Gaza over the past seven months.
“Around 110,000 people have now fled Rafah looking for safety,” the main United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA, posted online on Friday. “But nowhere is safe in the #GazaStrip & living conditions are atrocious.” On Thursday, a U.N. official said that 79,000 people had left since Israel issued its evacuation order.
“The only hope is an immediate #Ceasefire,” UNRWA said.
Israel seized control of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in what it called a “limited operation,” and intense fighting has continued on the eastern edge of the city since. The Israeli military said on Friday that its aircraft had struck Hamas members and rocket-launching sites at several locations in the Rafah area over the past day, while Hamas said its forces had fired mortars on Israeli troops east of the city.
The Israeli security cabinet agreed on Thursday night to expand the operation in Rafah, two officials said, but it was not clear what that would mean in practical terms.
Fighting continues in other areas of Gaza, and on Friday, the Israeli military said four of its soldiers were killed and two were seriously injured by an explosive device near Gaza City, in the northern part of the territory. Israeli forces seized the north months ago but have been unable to control it completely, repeatedly battling militants there.
In an apparent sign of the militants’ staying power, Hamas took responsibility for a rocket attack, the first one since December that was launched from Gaza and triggered air-raid sirens in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Israel has designated what it calls a safe zone for Gazans fleeing Rafah, including Al-Mawasi, a coastal section of Gaza it has advised people to go to for months. But the United Nations has said it is neither safe nor equipped to receive them.
On Friday, UNICEF’s senior emergency coordinator in the Gaza Strip, Hamish Young, said from Rafah that in his 30 years working on large-scale humanitarian emergencies “I’ve never been involved in a situation as devastating, complex or erratic as this.”
“Yesterday, I walked around Al-Mawasi,” Mr. Young said. ”The roads to Mawasi are jammed — many hundreds of trucks, buses, cars and donkey carts loaded with people and possessions.”
“People I speak with tell me they are exhausted, terrified and know life in Al-Mawasi will, again, impossibly, be harder,” he said. “Families lack proper sanitation facilities, drinking water and shelter.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
— Raja Abdulrahim and Bilal Shbair
People leaving Rafah describe yet another fearful flight from Israeli assaults.
Palestinians fleeing Rafah on Thursday.
Credit: Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Manal al-Wakeel and her extended family of 30 people thought they were going home.
Displaced from their home in Gaza City months ago, Ms. al-Wakeel and relatives began packing their bags on Monday and preparing to dismantle their tent in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas had announced that it had accepted a cease-fire proposal from Qatar and Egypt, leaving many Gazans thinking that a truce was imminent. Their joy was short-lived; it soon became clear that Hamas was not talking about the same proposal endorsed days earlier by Israel, which said the two sides remained far apart.
Instead, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets in eastern Rafah telling people to flee and move to what Israel called a humanitarian zone to the north, as the Israeli military bombarded the area. Gazan health officials say that dozens have been killed since Israel’s incursion into parts of Rafah this week.
“We thought that day a cease-fire was possible,” said Ms. al-Wakeel, 48, who helped the aid group World Central Kitchen prepare hot meals.
She and her family had been sheltering near the Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, in an area battered by Israeli airstrikes and ground combat. The director of the hospital, Dr. Marwan al-Hams, said on Monday that it had received the bodies of 26 people killed by Israeli fire, and treated 50 who were wounded. The hospital was evacuated the next day.
So rather than return home, on Tuesday night Ms. al-Wakeel, her husband, her 11 children and other relatives found a semi-truck that would take them and their belongings, including suitcases of clothes, pots and pans and tents, for 2,500 shekels — about $670 — in search of another place to stay.
They left Rafah around midnight and made their way north along with hundreds of tuk-tuks, trucks, cars and donkey-carts full of other displaced families and their possessions.
“It was a scary night, the truck was moving slowly because of the heavy load on it,” she said.
Once out of Rafah, they made frequent stops at schools and other buildings, desperately looking for any empty place for them to shelter. But every place was full.
Others couldn’t find a place, either, and Ms. al-Wakeel saw many people sleeping by the side of the road next to whatever belongings they had fled with.
At a U.N. school in Deir El-Balah, a young man suggested they stay in an empty concrete building — with no windows or doors — that belonged to the Hamas-led government’s ministry of social development.
“It looked like a dangerous place,” she said, adding that they had been told that a woman and her daughter had previously been killed in one of the building’s rooms by an Israeli missile.
But they were too afraid to continue roaming around in the darkness, and decided to spend the night there and look for a safer place come morning.
“I feel so sad and disappointed for what happened to Rafah as it was stable for us there,” she said. “We have spent so much time having to arrange new places for ourselves again and we feel depressed and so exhausted from repeating the same suffering.”
Saeda al-Nemnem, 42, had given birth to twins less than a month before Israel dropped the leaflets over where they were sheltering in Rafah, ordering them to leave. Her family, also displaced from Gaza City, dispatched a relative to look for a truck that could ferry them north, despite the intense Israeli airstrikes at the time.
The relative, Mohammed al-Jojo, was killed by an Israeli strike on the tractor he was riding, she said.
He “was killed when he was getting us out of that area to a safer place,” she said. “I feel I caused his death.”
Despite the dangers in getting on the road, staying where they were in Rafah was no safer.
Along the terrifying journey to the city of Khan Younis, where she and her family of eight found shelter in a room attached to Al Aqsa University’s main building, they could hear what seemed like explosions from Israeli bombs, missiles and artillery, she said.
“My children’s heartbeats were so high that I could feel them,” she said. It was the heaviest bombardment she had ever heard, she said, “so close and so terrifying for me and my children.”
— Raja Abdulrahim and Bilal Shbair Reporting from Jerusalem and from Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip
U.N. officials warn that aid efforts face imminent threat from lack of fuel.
An employee with fuel tanks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Friday.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
After five days without fuel deliveries to Gaza, United Nations officials said on Friday that large parts of the international aid mission faced imminent closure, deepening the humanitarian emergency as levels of malnutrition and disease mount.
“Humanitarian operations cannot run without fuel,” Georgios Petropoulos, head of the U.N. aid office in the southern city of Rafah, said. The U.N.’s humanitarian activities, particularly food and health care aid, would halt “within the next two days” unless solutions were found quickly to allow deliveries of fuel and other supplies into Gaza, he said.
Raising fears of a full invasion of Rafah, Israel this week seized the Gaza side of the crossing with Egypt in what it described as a limited operation. The United Nations said that no aid is reaching Gaza through the south.
Only a trickle of aid is entering through a border crossing point at the northern end of the Gaza Strip, in Erez, and that cannot reach the south and is inadequate given the scale of need, Mr. Petropoulos said in a video news briefing from Gaza.
The U.N. food agency and UNRWA, the main aid agency for Palestinians, will run out of food for distribution in southern Gaza on Saturday, Mr. Petropoulos said.
Five hospitals, five field hospitals, 10 mobile clinics treating war injuries and malnutrition, and nearly 30 ambulances will stop operating “in the next day or so,” because of a lack of fuel, he said.
Eight of 12 bakeries in southern Gaza have already halted operations for lack of fuel and stock, he added, and the remaining four are expected to stop working by Monday.
“In a matter of days, if this is not corrected, the lack of fuel will really grind the whole humanitarian operation to a halt,” said Hamish Young, the U.N. children’s agency emergency coordinator in Gaza.
— Nick Cumming-Bruce reporting from Geneva
UNRWA says it closed its headquarters in East Jerusalem after attacks and a fire.
A demonstration outside the UNRWA offices in the West Bank in March.Credit...Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The main United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA, said on Thursday that it would temporarily close its headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem for the safety of its staff after parts of the compound were set on fire following weeks of attacks.
“This evening, Israeli residents set fire twice to the perimeter of the UNRWA Headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem,” said the leader of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, on social media.
The fire caused extensive damage to the outdoor areas of the compound, Mr. Lazzarini said, but there were no injuries to workers there from UNRWA or other U.N. agencies. He added that some of the workers “had to put out the fire themselves as it took the Israeli fire extinguishers and police a while before they turned up.”
On Friday, Israeli police said in a statement that an investigation was started on “suspicion of a brush fire ignition” next to the UNRWA facility and that preliminary findings suggested it was started by minors and was therefore not subject to criminal prosecution. It offered no further details, but said the investigation was still going on.
The attack put the lives of U.N. staff at “serious risk” and comes two days after protesters threw stones at staff members at the compound, Mr. Lazzarini said.
Protests by Israeli settlers calling for UNRWA’s closure have been continuing for months. “On several occasions, Israeli extremists threatened our staff with guns,” Mr. Lazzarini said in Thursday’s social media post, adding that under international law, it is Israel’s responsibility “as an occupying power to ensure that United Nations personnel and facilities are protected at all times.”
Many Israeli officials have called for years for UNRWA to be dismantled, and the agency lost funding from some donor countries earlier this year after Israel accused a dozen of its employees of being involved in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7. An independent review commissioned by the U.N. and released in April found that Israel had not provided any evidence to support its further accusations that many UNRWA staff members are members of terrorist organizations.
— Anushka Patil
An American aid ship heads toward Gaza, but the system for unloading it still isn’t in place.
The container ship Sagamore, right, docked in Cyprus on Wednesday. Credit: Petros Karadjias/Associated Press
An American vessel carrying aid intended for Gaza has departed from Cyprus, the Pentagon said on Thursday, but a temporary floating pier constructed by the U.S. military is not in place to unload the food and supplies meant for the enclave.
Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a news briefing on Thursday afternoon that while the construction of the floating pier and the causeway has been completed, weather conditions have made it unsafe to actually place them off the coast of Gaza.
General Ryder said that the aid on the vessel, called Sagamore, eventually would be loaded onto another American motor vessel docked at Ashdod, the Roy P. Benavidez. That second vessel would take the aid to the floating pier system as soon as it is installed off the coast in northern Gaza, he said, allowing it to be delivered to the enclave.
Sagamore appeared to be anchored at the Israeli port of Ashdod by late Thursday evening, according to VesselFinder, a ship tracking website. For now, the aid for Palestinians, desperately needed, is roughly 20 miles from the nearest Gazan border crossing.
“While I’m not going to provide a specific date, we expect these temporary piers to be put into position in the very near future, pending suitable security and weather conditions,” General Ryder said.
Israel has prevented the construction of Gaza’s own international seaport, prompting the United States and another aid group, the World Central Kitchen, to create their own systems for getting aid into the enclave by sea.
But aid groups and experts have frequently criticized the maritime efforts as costly and complicated ways to deliver aid, citing trucking as a more efficient way to get food inside Gaza. After Israeli strikes killed seven World Central Kitchen workers, the group paused its maritime operations there. The food charity has since said it would restart operations in Gaza with the help of Palestinian aid workers.
More food is needed in Gaza. The director of the World Food Program, Cindy McCain, said recently that some areas are already experiencing a famine.
Displaced from their home in Gaza City months ago, Ms. al-Wakeel and relatives began packing their bags on Monday and preparing to dismantle their tent in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas had announced that it had accepted a cease-fire proposal from Qatar and Egypt, leaving many Gazans thinking that a truce was imminent. Their joy was short-lived; it soon became clear that Hamas was not talking about the same proposal endorsed days earlier by Israel, which said the two sides remained far apart.
Instead, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets in eastern Rafah telling people to flee and move to what Israel called a humanitarian zone to the north, as the Israeli military bombarded the area. Gazan health officials say that dozens have been killed since Israel’s incursion into parts of Rafah this week.
“We thought that day a cease-fire was possible,” said Ms. al-Wakeel, 48, who helped the aid group World Central Kitchen prepare hot meals.
She and her family had been sheltering near the Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, in an area battered by Israeli airstrikes and ground combat. The director of the hospital, Dr. Marwan al-Hams, said on Monday that it had received the bodies of 26 people killed by Israeli fire, and treated 50 who were wounded. The hospital was evacuated the next day.
So rather than return home, on Tuesday night Ms. al-Wakeel, her husband, her 11 children and other relatives found a semi-truck that would take them and their belongings, including suitcases of clothes, pots and pans and tents, for 2,500 shekels — about $670 — in search of another place to stay.
They left Rafah around midnight and made their way north along with hundreds of tuk-tuks, trucks, cars and donkey-carts full of other displaced families and their possessions.
“It was a scary night, the truck was moving slowly because of the heavy load on it,” she said.
Once out of Rafah, they made frequent stops at schools and other buildings, desperately looking for any empty place for them to shelter. But every place was full.
Others couldn’t find a place, either, and Ms. al-Wakeel saw many people sleeping by the side of the road next to whatever belongings they had fled with.
At a U.N. school in Deir El-Balah, a young man suggested they stay in an empty concrete building — with no windows or doors — that belonged to the Hamas-led government’s ministry of social development.
“It looked like a dangerous place,” she said, adding that they had been told that a woman and her daughter had previously been killed in one of the building’s rooms by an Israeli missile.
But they were too afraid to continue roaming around in the darkness, and decided to spend the night there and look for a safer place come morning.
“I feel so sad and disappointed for what happened to Rafah as it was stable for us there,” she said. “We have spent so much time having to arrange new places for ourselves again and we feel depressed and so exhausted from repeating the same suffering.”
Saeda al-Nemnem, 42, had given birth to twins less than a month before Israel dropped the leaflets over where they were sheltering in Rafah, ordering them to leave. Her family, also displaced from Gaza City, dispatched a relative to look for a truck that could ferry them north, despite the intense Israeli airstrikes at the time.
The relative, Mohammed al-Jojo, was killed by an Israeli strike on the tractor he was riding, she said.
He “was killed when he was getting us out of that area to a safer place,” she said. “I feel I caused his death.”
Despite the dangers in getting on the road, staying where they were in Rafah was no safer.
Along the terrifying journey to the city of Khan Younis, where she and her family of eight found shelter in a room attached to Al Aqsa University’s main building, they could hear what seemed like explosions from Israeli bombs, missiles and artillery, she said.
“My children’s heartbeats were so high that I could feel them,” she said. It was the heaviest bombardment she had ever heard, she said, “so close and so terrifying for me and my children.”
— Raja Abdulrahim and Bilal Shbair Reporting from Jerusalem and from Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip
U.N. officials warn that aid efforts face imminent threat from lack of fuel.
An employee with fuel tanks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Friday.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
After five days without fuel deliveries to Gaza, United Nations officials said on Friday that large parts of the international aid mission faced imminent closure, deepening the humanitarian emergency as levels of malnutrition and disease mount.
“Humanitarian operations cannot run without fuel,” Georgios Petropoulos, head of the U.N. aid office in the southern city of Rafah, said. The U.N.’s humanitarian activities, particularly food and health care aid, would halt “within the next two days” unless solutions were found quickly to allow deliveries of fuel and other supplies into Gaza, he said.
Raising fears of a full invasion of Rafah, Israel this week seized the Gaza side of the crossing with Egypt in what it described as a limited operation. The United Nations said that no aid is reaching Gaza through the south.
Only a trickle of aid is entering through a border crossing point at the northern end of the Gaza Strip, in Erez, and that cannot reach the south and is inadequate given the scale of need, Mr. Petropoulos said in a video news briefing from Gaza.
The U.N. food agency and UNRWA, the main aid agency for Palestinians, will run out of food for distribution in southern Gaza on Saturday, Mr. Petropoulos said.
Five hospitals, five field hospitals, 10 mobile clinics treating war injuries and malnutrition, and nearly 30 ambulances will stop operating “in the next day or so,” because of a lack of fuel, he said.
Eight of 12 bakeries in southern Gaza have already halted operations for lack of fuel and stock, he added, and the remaining four are expected to stop working by Monday.
“In a matter of days, if this is not corrected, the lack of fuel will really grind the whole humanitarian operation to a halt,” said Hamish Young, the U.N. children’s agency emergency coordinator in Gaza.
— Nick Cumming-Bruce reporting from Geneva
UNRWA says it closed its headquarters in East Jerusalem after attacks and a fire.
A demonstration outside the UNRWA offices in the West Bank in March.Credit...Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The main United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA, said on Thursday that it would temporarily close its headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem for the safety of its staff after parts of the compound were set on fire following weeks of attacks.
“This evening, Israeli residents set fire twice to the perimeter of the UNRWA Headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem,” said the leader of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, on social media.
The fire caused extensive damage to the outdoor areas of the compound, Mr. Lazzarini said, but there were no injuries to workers there from UNRWA or other U.N. agencies. He added that some of the workers “had to put out the fire themselves as it took the Israeli fire extinguishers and police a while before they turned up.”
On Friday, Israeli police said in a statement that an investigation was started on “suspicion of a brush fire ignition” next to the UNRWA facility and that preliminary findings suggested it was started by minors and was therefore not subject to criminal prosecution. It offered no further details, but said the investigation was still going on.
The attack put the lives of U.N. staff at “serious risk” and comes two days after protesters threw stones at staff members at the compound, Mr. Lazzarini said.
Protests by Israeli settlers calling for UNRWA’s closure have been continuing for months. “On several occasions, Israeli extremists threatened our staff with guns,” Mr. Lazzarini said in Thursday’s social media post, adding that under international law, it is Israel’s responsibility “as an occupying power to ensure that United Nations personnel and facilities are protected at all times.”
Many Israeli officials have called for years for UNRWA to be dismantled, and the agency lost funding from some donor countries earlier this year after Israel accused a dozen of its employees of being involved in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7. An independent review commissioned by the U.N. and released in April found that Israel had not provided any evidence to support its further accusations that many UNRWA staff members are members of terrorist organizations.
— Anushka Patil
An American aid ship heads toward Gaza, but the system for unloading it still isn’t in place.
The container ship Sagamore, right, docked in Cyprus on Wednesday. Credit: Petros Karadjias/Associated Press
An American vessel carrying aid intended for Gaza has departed from Cyprus, the Pentagon said on Thursday, but a temporary floating pier constructed by the U.S. military is not in place to unload the food and supplies meant for the enclave.
Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a news briefing on Thursday afternoon that while the construction of the floating pier and the causeway has been completed, weather conditions have made it unsafe to actually place them off the coast of Gaza.
General Ryder said that the aid on the vessel, called Sagamore, eventually would be loaded onto another American motor vessel docked at Ashdod, the Roy P. Benavidez. That second vessel would take the aid to the floating pier system as soon as it is installed off the coast in northern Gaza, he said, allowing it to be delivered to the enclave.
Sagamore appeared to be anchored at the Israeli port of Ashdod by late Thursday evening, according to VesselFinder, a ship tracking website. For now, the aid for Palestinians, desperately needed, is roughly 20 miles from the nearest Gazan border crossing.
“While I’m not going to provide a specific date, we expect these temporary piers to be put into position in the very near future, pending suitable security and weather conditions,” General Ryder said.
Israel has prevented the construction of Gaza’s own international seaport, prompting the United States and another aid group, the World Central Kitchen, to create their own systems for getting aid into the enclave by sea.
But aid groups and experts have frequently criticized the maritime efforts as costly and complicated ways to deliver aid, citing trucking as a more efficient way to get food inside Gaza. After Israeli strikes killed seven World Central Kitchen workers, the group paused its maritime operations there. The food charity has since said it would restart operations in Gaza with the help of Palestinian aid workers.
More food is needed in Gaza. The director of the World Food Program, Cindy McCain, said recently that some areas are already experiencing a famine.