RUTHFULLY YOURS

The only real beneficiary of the Biden administration’s ill-considered plan to build a floating pier to deliver US aid to Gaza will be the Hamas terrorist organisation that provoked the Gaza conflict in the first place.

Under plans drawn up by the Pentagon, an estimated 1,000 US military personnel are to be deployed to construct the floating pier off the coast of Gaza that will enable Washington to deliver aid directly to Palestinian civilians.

Four US Army ships are currently making the month-long voyage from their base in Virginia to Gaza, where they will be involved in the construction of what the Pentagon calls a modular causeway system, including a large floating platform that will enable ships to unload large containers of aid.

The humanitarian supplies will then be transferred to a motorised string of causeway sections that will be pushed towards the shore for unloading.

The new aid initiative by the Biden administration has been taken in response to claims made by aid agencies that the estimated 2.3 million Palestinians resident in Gaza are facing starvation due to supply shortages, a claim that has been angrily dismissed by the Israeli government.

Michael Fakhri, a United Nations official responsible for food aid, has even accused the Israelis of deliberately starving Palestinian civilians in Gaza, an accusation that was fiercely rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Our policies are to put in as much humanitarian aid as we could,” Netanyahu insisted, warning that efforts by the international community to provide aid could simply result in prolonging the war if it ended up in the hands of Hamas terrorists.

“When we started out putting in the humanitarian convoys, we said there will be one problem. And that is what if Hamas tries to steal the food and the drugs that we’re bringing for the civilian population, for its own terrorist forces?”

Washington’s decision to construct a pier, moreover, has been taken because previous methods of delivering aid have experienced significant difficulties. Attempts by the US military to delivery aid by parachutes resulted in five Palestinians being killed after a parachute failed on an aid package dropped by air. An estimated 100 Palestinians were also reported killed when they attempted to intercept aid trucks transporting vital humanitarian supplies in Gaza.

There are mounting concerns, however, that the Biden administration’s pier plan could ultimately boomerang, especially, as Netanyahu himself has warned, if the US aid and the port itself end up in the hands of Hamas terrorists.

According to journalist Caroline Glick:

“At America’s request, Hamas ally Qatar has agreed to take charge of operating and financing the temporary pier on its way from the United States to the Gaza coast, Israel’s Channel 14 reported on Tuesday.

“Qatar consented to run the port on condition that the construction work go to the Al-Hisi firm, ‘a company controlled and sponsored by Hamas,’ according to Channel 14 correspondent Baruch Yedid, citing Arab media reports following a meeting in Cyprus between diplomatic officials from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates several days ago.

“‘Qatar has an interest in this port. Qatar wants to preserve Hamas,’ he said. ‘Qatar also wants leverage over Hamas.'”

Yigal Carmon, founder and president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) wrote:

“This [Biden] administration betrayed its allies – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan – by handing the port over to Qatar, namely to Hamas…. What all anti-U.S. elements will take away from this tragic episode is not that America stands by its human values to support and care for the population of Gaza, but rather that America is weak and that this is why it is granting the port to Qatar and Hamas.”

As the Israeli government has consistently pointed out, the group most responsible for any aid crisis in Hamas, which continues to control much of the Gaza Strip. Apart from infiltrating key aid organisations, such as UNRWA, where several Palestinian members of the organisation have been accused of taking part in the October 7 attacks, Hamas also controls the Gaza “Health Ministry” responsible for putting out the dire warnings about the suffering of Palestinian civilians in the conflict, which critics claim are being deliberately exaggerated.

By deploying US forces so close to Gaza, Washington also runs the risk of the US military becoming directly involved in a confrontation with Hamas and its Iranian backers. If US forces were to come under fire while delivering aid to Gaza, they would have no option but to return fire, thereby running the risk of causing a major escalation in the conflict.

The pier plan, moreover, comes against a background of worsening relations between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s handling of its military offensive in Gaza with Hamas.

At a time when the Israeli people find themselves in an existential struggle against Hamas and other Iranian-backed terror groups such as Hezbollah, the Jewish state needs all the international support it can muster to ensure it achieves its declared goal of achieving total victory over Hamas.

The constant barrage of criticism being levelled against Netanyahu’s government, though, by the Biden administration threatens to undermine global backing for Israel to the extent that Hamas could end up remaining in control of large swathes of the Gaza Strip, with all the dire implications that would have for Israel’s future security.

In his most recent broadside against Netanyahu, Biden made the outlandish claim that, by maintaining Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the Israeli leader was “hurting Israel more than helping Israel”.

Speaking in an interview with the MSNBC news channel, Biden repeated his accusation that too many Palestinian civilians were being killed as a result of the conflict in Gaza, even though Hamas is the only source for the Palestinian casualty figures, which has inevitably raised questions about their veracity.

Critics argue the Palestinian casualty figures presented by Hamas are nothing more than a blatant attempt by the group to use lies and propaganda to turn global opinion against Israel.

Biden himself referred to the Hamas-provided casualty figures in his MSNBC interview, claiming that while Netanyahu “has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas,” he insisted that the Israeli leader “must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.”

In an attempt to increase the pressure on Israel to scale down its military operations in Gaza, Biden also warned that the White House would see any attempt by Netanyahu to expand Israel’s military offensive to include Rafah, Hamas’s last remaining stronghold in Gaza, as a “red line”.

Biden’s comments prompted a withering response from Netanyahu, who replied in a later interview that, if Biden thought the Israeli leader was going against “the wish of the majority of Israelis, and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he’s wrong on both counts.”

Netanyahu also gave a clear indication that the Israeli military would extend its operations to include Rafah. “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them,” Netanyahu declared in an interview with the Politico website. “You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn’t happen again. Never happens again.”

Meanwhile, the Spanish aid ship Open Arms this month brought a load of food aid from the Cypriot port of Larnaca to Gaza, an operation conducted in cooperation with the EU, which is seeking to set up a humanitarian sea corridor in the eastern Mediterranean to expand its aid deliveries to the enclave.

As Hamas ultimately controls most of the aid distribution networks in Gaza, the plans currently being drawn up by the US and Europe to expand aid deliveries could ultimately prove counter-productive in terms of ending the conflict, as Hamas terrorists have a long track record of exploiting foreign aid to strengthen their terrorist activities in Gaza.

If the Biden administration and its European allies are really serious about ending the conflict in Gaza, then they should give their unequivocal backing to the Israeli military in its battle to destroy the terrorist infrastructure Hamas has constructed in Gaza.

For it will only be when Hamas is completely destroyed, and no longer poses a threat to the Israeli people, that there can be any genuine prospect of lasting peace in the region.

Con Coughlin is the Telegraph‘s Defence and Foreign Affairs Editor and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.