In a scathing U.S. government inspector general’s report, President Joe Biden was said to have wasted $230 million of taxpayer money on a harebrained maritime operation in Gaza intended to accelerate humanitarian aid to Palestinians displaced by war. In sum, Biden’s “temporary pier operated intermittently for about 20 days” and was then embarrassingly shut down.
On March 7, Biden announced that he had directed “the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.” The operation came in response to criticism from his left-wing base for U.S. support to Israel’s military operations against Hamas after the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 invasion of Israel in which some 1,200 Israeli civilians were killed and 253 others were brutally kidnapped.
For years, Hamas has manipulated the more than 2 million Palestinian people living in the Gaza Strip as human shields to facilitate its war of extermination against the Jewish state.
As the ruling authority of Gaza, Hamas bears sole responsibility for the nearly 40,000 people killed since October, and its tactics ensure that the entire Gazan population has been displaced in the middle of a war zone.
Instead of demanding that Hamas end its war of aggression and immediately lay down its arms as the quickest way to ending Palestinian suffering, Biden sought to pursue a fool’s errand.
The president ignored his own administration’s warnings against pursuing a maritime aid approach. Gaza possesses no seaports, the Mediterranean Sea is subject to violent storms, the region lacks docking and road infrastructure to collect and deliver the aid, and the pier would be located amid a hostile Palestinian population in which Hamas terrorists routinely mix in with the civilian population.
Before Biden’s announcement, the lead U.S. federal agency tasked with emergency global disaster responses, the U.S. Agency for International Development, “advocated for transporting aid through land routes [from Israel and Egypt] and did not pursue planning a maritime route because of the logistical and technical challenges it would present,” the IG’s report said.
The warning was lent more credibility, given the USAID staff’s anti-Israel bias. Some 1,000 USAID officials had signed an open letter “urging the Biden administration to call for an immediate cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas” only weeks after the October attack. Acceding to that maximalist demand would have left Hamas’ military capabilities intact and Israel vulnerable to more terrorist attacks from Gaza in the future.
Biden also ignored warnings by humanitarian organizations already operating on the ground that “significant safety and security risks [would] compromise its operations.” The inspector general’s report duly notes “multiple instances of looting after aid was collected from the beach and transported into Gaza, attacks on warehouses, and drivers being detained or shot.”
Thus, there is a high probability that U.S. aid was seized by Hamas to support its war aims against the people of Israel, one of America’s strongest allies.
For years, U.N. agencies have allowed millions of dollars in Western aid to be diverted by Hamas to finance its terrorist operations. USAID admitted that it “did not have staff in Gaza” to ensure aid delivered to the pier would not be stolen by Hamas. As a result, it could not “assess compliance with [anti-terrorism] provisions,” of U.S. law, according to the report.
In addition, USAID’s “third-party monitor had not conducted site visits of [its partners’] activities.” The report further cites how during the two days of the pier’s operation how “crowds improperly removed humanitarian aid from 12 of 26 [aid] trucks attempting to make the trip from the temporary pier to the U.N.’s warehouse in Gaza,” proof that taxpayer funds are financing Hamas’ war on the Jewish people.
This debacle echoes Biden’s rejection of advice from his military experts back in 2021. They had pressed Biden not to abandon our bases in Afghanistan, which led to America’s disastrous withdrawal, the killing of 13 U.S. service members, the death of thousands of Afghans, and the loss of $7 billions in advanced U.S. weaponry that the terrorist Taliban regime inherited.
As with the floating pier-turned-white elephant, Biden refused to listen to his own experts, leading to another foreign policy failure in which, once again, the American taxpayer was left footing the bill.
Biden’s bumbling response to his $230 million debacle? “I was hopeful that would be more successful.”
