By Al-Fassel | 2024-05-21

The temporary pier the US military constructed to facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza is serving purely humanitarian purposes as part of a wider international effort, top US officials said amid disinformation about purported military reasons for the pier.

US military personnel anchored the pier to the beach in Gaza on May 16 and aid began flowing into Gaza immediately, deputy Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said.

This was done "without any US boots on the ground in Gaza," she said.

There is "a small footprint of US military on the pier, but they will not go into Gaza," US National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said May 17.

"There are no Israeli Defense Forces on the pier," he said.

The pier is supporting "the efforts of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations (UN) to deliver and distribute aid," Singh said.

"This is an internationally backed effort coordinated with the UN," she noted, adding that the US military "is merely providing the logistical support to enable humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza from the sea."

"It is designed solely -- only -- for the delivery of humanitarian assistance," Kirby said.

"There are no US service members in Gaza," he said. "There is a small US military component on the pier itself" to "provide a modicum of security for it but also to assist with the logistics."

The US Navy is helping to get the aid "onto smaller vessels out further away from the pier, well off the coast, so that those smaller vessels then can transload the material onto the pier," he said.

"So, what we do is we take the stuff off the bigger ships -- all well off the coast -- put it on smaller US Navy vessels. Those smaller US Navy vessels will bring it into the pier and offload it so it can get onto trucks."

"There's been some bogus stuff out there in the information environment, particularly in the region, that this has some sort of military capacity or operational capacity for the IDF, and it just doesn’t," said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. "It’s nothing more than humanitarian assistance."

"And we've also passed that message back through the appropriate channels to Hamas so they understand exactly what this is," she said.

"I mean, we're making no secret about what this thing is and what it's not."