The American military unit establishes a relief pier off the shores of Gaza (the brigade’s Facebook site)

The "temporary dock" being built on Gaza's Mediterranean coast is not there to alleviate famine, but to deport Palestinians on ships and into permanent exile.

Sidewalks let things in. They let things get out. Israel, which has no intention of stopping its deadly blockade of Gaza, including its policy of forced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel 2.3 million Palestinians.

Configurable support

If the Arab world does not take them, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested during his first round of visits after October 7, the Palestinians will be loaded onto ships. I worked in Beirut in 1982 when about eight and a half thousand PLO members were sent by sea to Tunisia, and another two and a half thousand ended up in other Arab countries. Israel expects the same forced transfer by sea to succeed in Gaza.

For this reason, Israel supports the “temporary dock” that the Biden administration is building, ostensibly to deliver food and aid to Gaza – food and aid whose “distribution” will be supervised by the Israeli army.

“You need drivers that don't exist, trucks that don't exist working in a distribution system that doesn't exist,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration and now head of the advocacy group International Refugee Aid, told The Guardian.

This "sea corridor" is Israel's Trojan horse, a ploy to expel the Palestinians. Small shipments of seaborne aid, such as air-dropped food packages, will not alleviate the looming famine. It's not meant to be.

Five Palestinians were killed and many others injured when a parachute carrying aid failed and crashed into a crowd of people near the Beach refugee camp in Gaza City.

The media office of the local government in Gaza said: “Droping aid in this way is glamorous propaganda and not a humanitarian service.” “We previously warned that it poses a threat to the lives of citizens in the Gaza Strip, and this is what happens when packages fall on the heads of citizens.”

If the United States and Israel are serious about alleviating the humanitarian crisis, let Israel allow the thousands of trucks carrying food and aid currently on Gaza's southern border to enter any of its multiple crossings. They won't do that. The "temporary dock" is a way to hide Washington's complicity in genocide.

The Jerusalem Post reported that it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who proposed the construction of the “temporary dock” to the Biden administration.

Deadly gift!

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant – who has called the Palestinians “human animals” and called for a complete blockade of Gaza, including cutting off electricity, food, water and fuel – praised the plan, saying: “It is designed to deliver aid directly to the population, thus continuing to work on Achieving the collapse of Hamas’ rule in Gaza.”

“Why does Israel, the architect of the Gaza famine, support the idea of ​​establishing a sea corridor for aid to address the crisis it started and is now getting worse?” Tamara Nassar writes in an article entitled: “What is the real purpose of Biden Port in Gaza?” This may seem contradictory if one assumes that the primary purpose of the sea corridor is to provide aid.

When Israel gives the Palestinians a gift, you can be sure it is a poisoned apple. Israel receiving the support of the Biden administration to build the pier is another example of the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv, where the Israeli lobby has bought off elected officials in the two ruling parties.

In a report released on March 15, Oxfam accuses Israel of actively obstructing relief operations in Gaza in defiance of International Court of Justice orders. It notes that 1.7 million Palestinians, about 75 percent of Gaza's population, face famine and that two-thirds of hospitals and more than 80 percent of all health clinics in Gaza are no longer operational. The report says; The majority of people “do not have access to clean drinking water” and “sanitation services do not work.”

The report says: The conditions we observed in Gaza were beyond catastrophic, and we saw not only a failure by the Israeli authorities to fulfill their responsibility to facilitate and support international aid efforts, but in fact we saw active steps being taken to obstruct and undermine these aid efforts. Israel's control of Gaza continues to be characterized by deliberate restrictive measures that have led to severe and systematic dysfunction in aid delivery.

Fake responses

Humanitarian organizations working in Gaza have reported a deterioration in the situation since the International Court of Justice imposed provisional measures, in light of the perceived risk of genocide, as Israeli barriers, restrictions and attacks against humanitarian workers intensify. Israel has maintained its "fake responses" in Gaza to serve its claim that it allows aid in the war in line with international laws.

Oxfam says; Israel employs “a dysfunctional inspection system that is logistically disproportionate to the volume of aid, keeping aid stranded and subject to cumbersome, repetitive, and unpredictable bureaucratic procedures that contribute to trucks being stranded in giant lines for an average of 20 days.”

Oxfam explains that Israel rejects “significant portions of aid, as it has a ‘dual (military) use’, banning fuel and vital generators entirely along with other items essential to a meaningful humanitarian response such as protective equipment and communications kit.”

Rejected aid “must go through a complex ‘pre-approval’ system, or it ends up being held in limbo in a warehouse in Al-Arish in Egypt.” Israel has also "suppressed humanitarian missions, largely closed off northern Gaza, and restricted access of international humanitarian workers not only to Gaza, but to Israel and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem as well."

Israel allowed 15,413 trucks to enter Gaza during the last days of the war. Oxfam estimates that Gazans need five times that number. Israel allowed 2,874 trucks in February, a 44 percent decrease from the previous month. Before October 7, 500 relief trucks entered Gaza daily.

Israeli soldiers also killed dozens of Palestinians trying to receive aid from trucks in more than two dozen incidents. These attacks include the killing of at least 21 Palestinians, and the wounding of 150, on March 14, when Israeli forces opened fire on thousands of people in Gaza City.

Catastrophic proportions

“The Israeli offensive has caught Gaza aid workers and international agency partners inside a ‘virtually uninhabitable’ environment of mass displacement and deprivation, where 75 per cent of solid waste is now dumped in informal sites, and 97 per cent of groundwater is unusable,” Oxfam says. "For human use, and the Israeli state uses famine as a weapon of war."

Oxfam notes that no place in Gaza is safe “amid the forced and often multiple displacement of almost the entire population, making the initial distribution of aid unviable, including the ability of agencies to help repair vital public services on a large scale.”

Oxfam attacks Israel; Because of its “disproportionate” and “indiscriminate” attacks on “civilian and humanitarian assets” as well as “solar, water, power and sanitation plants, UN buildings, hospitals, roads, aid convoys and warehouses, even when these assets are supposed to have their coordinates shared with the Israeli military to provide protection.” ".

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said: More than 32,000 people have been killed since the start of the Israeli attack five months ago. A ministry statement said: The death toll includes at least 81 deaths in the previous 24 hours, adding that 73,792 people have been injured in Gaza since October 7. Thousands more are missing, many buried under rubble.

None of these Israeli tactics will change with the construction of a “temporary dock.” Indeed, given the pending ground offensive on Rafah, where 1.2 million displaced Palestinians are in tent cities or camping out in the open, Israel's tactics will only get worse.

Israel, according to its plan, is creating a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions, with thousands of Palestinians killed; Because of bombs, shells, missiles, bullets, hunger and infectious diseases, the only option would be death or deportation. The dock is where the last act of this horrific campaign of genocide will be carried out, as Palestinians are rounded up by Israeli soldiers on ships.

How disastrous would it be for the Biden administration – without which this genocide could not have been carried out – to facilitate this?

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.