Providing Aid to the Gaza Strip for the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore Project: U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address

The official said that early on there were concerns about the project being too focused on aid efforts. An official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly talk about the matter said that the agency added enough resources to deal with both the pier and land routes at once.

The U.S. military could not find a neutral country that was willing to do the job so Israel’s military provided the security.

The U.S. and the WFP agreed to place the pier in north Gaza, where there was greatest need for aid, and that a U.N. member nation would ensure the safety of the pier. That step was taken to safeguard WFP’s impartiality among Gaza’s warring parties.

The United States had failed to honor agreements it had made with the UN to give aid to Palestine, according to the watchdog report.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Tuesday that the project “had a real impact” of getting food to hungry Palestinian civilians despite the obstacles.

High waves and bad weather repeatedly damaged the pier, and the U.N. World Food Program ended cooperation with the project after an Israeli rescue operation used an area nearby to whisk away hostages, raising concerns about whether its workers would be seen as neutral and independent in the conflict.

In order to deliver aid to Gaza, President Joe Biden ordered construction of a temporary pier, despite the concerns of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“Multiple USAID staff expressed concerns that the focus on using JLOTS would detract from the Agency’s advocacy for opening land crossings, which were seen as more efficient and proven methods of transporting aid into Gaza,” according to the inspector general report. “However, once the President issued the directive, the Agency’s focus was to use JLOTS as effectively as possible.”

The project, called the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, would only be up and running for 20 days. Aid groups pulled out of the project by July, ending a mission plagued by repeated weather and security problems that limited how much food and other emergency supplies could get to starving Palestinians.

Biden announced plans to use the temporary pier in his State of the Union address in March to hasten the delivery of aid to the Palestinian territory besieged by war between Israel and Hamas.

U.S. Embassy Press Release on “Removing the Humanitarian Zones” of the Gaza Strip Strip During the Oct. 7 Gaza Attack

Many of the Palestinians killed in the war were women and children, according to Gaza health officials. The war was triggered when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people.

The U.S., along with Qatar and Egypt, has been trying to inch Israel and Hamas closer to a cease-fire deal to eventually end the war in Gaza. The talks continued this week and the mediation team presented a proposal to bridge the gaps between the two sides. Israel and Hamas have yet to reach a deal.

The document recommends that the Israeli military take several measures to protect the population and humanitarian sites, such as not renewing lapsed evacuated orders or holding operations at least 48 hours after issuing them.

NPR has independently interviewed multiple civilians in Gaza who have described Israeli airstrikes hitting their area just hours after they were told to evacuate, forcing them to flee in haste and dangerous conditions.

The document says the “humanitarian zones” have been problematic, and that they are just small parts of the land that the military says is safe to shelter Palestinians from airstrikes. But Palestinians say that the spaces are crowded and squalid, with little access to clean water or bathrooms. Garbage is piling up in these areas. Aid groups say it is impossible to deliver aid in these areas.

TEL AVIV, Israel — The Biden administration is urging Israel’s military to make major changes to its “drastically increased” pace of mass evacuation orders that is driving repeated displacement of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, according to a U.S. Embassy memo obtained by NPR.

For the first time since the war began last October, Israel’s military withdrew evacuation orders and announced Palestinian civilians could return to their homes in an area of central Gaza on Thursday, a day after the U.S. government memo said officials had urged Israel to rescind evacuation orders it no longer deems necessary. The Israeli military’s Nadav Shoshani tells NPR that the area became a safe zone again after they were successful in disrupting militant rocket launchers and recovering the body of a soldier.

The Aug. 28 cable by the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, marked “sensitive but not classified” and addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department, contained an assessment by officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development on the effects of Israel’s evacuation orders on the Palestinian population.

The agency didn’t comment on any internal documents, but it did say that the humanitarian conditions in Gaza are “incredibly dire.”