(Washington) The United States’ establishment of a temporary port for aid deliveries to Gaza will take up to 60 days and likely involve more than 1,000 troops, the Pentagon announced Friday.
In his State of the Union address on Thursday, US President Joe Biden ordered the military to build a temporary port in Gaza to deliver more humanitarian aid to the Palestinian territory that has been bombed and besieged by Israel.
The United States will “establish a temporary offshore jetty that will allow cargo ships to transfer cargo to smaller boats for transport and unloading along a temporary causeway to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza “, Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder told reporters.
“It will take more than 1,000 American soldiers” to install this port and “up to 60 days to deploy and build the causeway and the pier,” added Mr. Ryder.
It “could provide more than two million meals a day to the citizens of Gaza,” he said, adding that “there will be no American troops on the ground in Gaza” as part of this operation. , for which Washington “will work with regional partners”.
Insufficient aid by land led the United States to join other countries in dropping packages by air.
A US military plane dropped more than 11,500 meals on Gaza on Friday as part of the fourth joint US-Jordan operation this month, the Pentagon announced.
During an airdrop, five people were killed and ten others injured by falling humanitarian aid packages, we learned from a hospital source.
A US defense official told AFP that “the United States was not behind the deaths in our Gaza airdrop”, while a Jordanian military source said none of the four planes from the kingdom which participated in the operation were involved.
On March 2, the United States began dropping humanitarian aid on Gaza, a territory besieged and bombarded by Israel after the bloody Hamas attack on October 7.
This attack resulted in the death of at least 1,160 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
The Israeli offensive has left more than 30,800 dead, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health, which controls the territory.
The amount of aid trucked into Gaza has plummeted in five months of war, and residents face severe shortages of food, water and medicine.
On Friday, the European Union and the United States, close partners of Israel, announced on Friday the upcoming opening of a maritime corridor between Cyprus and the Gaza Strip.