Almost a week after Pentagon officials began suggesting that the temporary pier in Gaza may not return, the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command has confirmed that the pier's mission is over.
"Now that that maritime surge mission was successful, it's now transitioning from a temporary pier in Gaza to a port in Ashdod, Israel," Vice Admiral Brad Cooper told reporters during a briefing Wednesday.
Cooper was adamant that, in the face of direct questioning by reporters about the political controversy and weather interruptions that had impacted the pier and led President Joe Biden to publicly say that he was disappointed, the pier had accomplished its mission in a "historically unprecedented operation" that transported "the highest volume of humanitarian assistance that the U.S. military has ever delivered into the Middle East."
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According to Cooper, the shift from using the Army's Joint Logistics Over the Shore (JLOTS) to the port Ashdod in Israel, just north of Gaza, means that even though the pier itself will be going away, the ships and troops that are supporting the mission will stay in the area for some time.
"We expect to use the same vessels that have been transporting aid from Cyprus to the pier," Cooper said, adding that "now the same vessels will be used to transport aid from Cyprus to Ashdod."
It's not clear whether the pier, which was moved to Ashdod in late June over weather conditions, has been dismantled yet.
The port in Cyprus, which was used as a staging and screening area for aid bound for Gaza, still has at least 5 million pounds of aid that is awaiting delivery.
Problems for the mission began to crop up almost immediately after the Army ships left for Gaza in the spring, when one of the ships carrying supplies was forced to turn back to port after experiencing a fire in its engine room. More breakdowns from other Army watercraft led to questions about the readiness of the Army's fleet.
Then came weather delays. High seas first delayed the pier's setup, but even once the pier was up and running in May, weather continued to plague the operation. In late May, a storm broke the pier apart and forced its first removal from Gaza to Ashdod for repairs. That storm also beached several Army boats on the Gaza shore for hours.
Since then, the pier has been removed three more times over weather issues, and despite being set up in May, it has only been operational "for a little more than 20 days" but delivered 19.4 million pounds of aid, according to Cooper.
One statistic Cooper pointed to was a goal of moving about 500,000 pounds of aid per day over the pier.
"Virtually every day, we were either doubling that number at a million pounds or tripling that number," he argued.
The vice admiral also noted that he expects the cost of the mission to be "well underneath the $230 million we estimated" before noting that when the military delivered 23 million pounds of aid to Haiti following a devastating earthquake in 2010, the Pentagon spent about $460 million.
Critics of the mission on Capitol Hill cheered the end of the effort.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement posted online that "the national embarrassment that this project has caused" is not over, and "the only miracle is that this doomed-from-the-start operation did not cost any American lives."
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called the effort "a gross waste of taxpayer dollars" in late June.
Cooper said that the pivot to delivering aid to Ashdod will offer a "more sustainable path," but other officials in the Biden administration also noted that delivering aid to Gaza faces issues beyond logistics.
Sonali Korde, the assistant to the administrator of USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, told reporters at the Wednesday briefing that "the key challenge we have right now in Gaza is around the insecurity and lawlessness that is hampering the distribution once aid gets into Gaza."
It's a problem that has persisted for months.
"We are unfortunately in a situation where the insecurity has increased again and we're seeing ... a rise in looting and other kinds of criminal activities, and that is definitely causing problems for distribution right now," she added.
When asked by reporters if there was a timeline for bringing troops home from the mission, Cooper said military officials are "not going to be in a position to talk about the timelines given, the operational context."
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