In his State of the Union address on Thursday, Joe Biden declared that the US military will build a floating pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid to 2.3 million Palestinians facing widespread famine under Israel’s brutal war and siege of the territory. The US president’s announcement followed a week of intermittent airdrops of food by US forces – a token amount of aid, woefully inadequate to the needs of a starving population.
It could take the Pentagon 30 to 60 days to set up a temporary port, which would involve deploying hundreds of US troops on ships near the Gaza coast. By then, thousands of Palestinians could starve to death; the UN recently warned that more than 575,000 people are confronting “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation”, especially in northern Gaza.
