(Gaza) On Tuesday (21/05/24) the Pentagon said it believes none of the hundreds of tons of aid delivered over several days via a military-built pier in Gaza has made it to Palestinians.
The pier, erected by the U.S. Army to ease the humanitarian crisis amid the Israel-Hamas war, was secured to the Gaza shoreline last Thursday, and trucks began dropping off pallets of food ashore on Friday. But the United Nations reported difficulties moving the aid once it reached the shore, including an apparent ambush that reportedly turned deadly. Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday that more than 569 metric tons of aid had been delivered to Gaza via the pier, called a Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore operation, or JLOTS, but that it did not appear that any of it had actually been delivered to the starving residents of Gaza. During the first days of aid deliveries, reports indicate that the security situation outside the pier area is highly unstable and dangerous. Ryder confirmed that some of the first loads of aid that were brought in were looted before aid organizations could formally distribute them. "As it was being taken along the transportation route, it was intercepted by some people who took that aid off those vehicles," Ryder said.
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."They've not seen trucks for a while," a U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. "They just basically mounted on the trucks and helped themselves to some of the food parcels."
