Food aid Warning that floating dock will not ease famine fears

A giant floating dock is nearing completion in the eastern Mediterranean from where it will be pushed towards the Gaza shore, but there is growing uncertainty over how useful the US project will be in containing a famine.

- Julian Borger

There are concerns in the humanitarian community that Israel has co-opted the pier plan - which Joe Biden touted as a way to bring about a "massive" increase in aid to Gaza - with one aid official warning the project was in danger of becoming a "smokescreen" for the planned invasion of Rafah.

The dock is expected to be in position by early May. According to several aid officials the plan is to anchor it not off northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is most severe, but at a point halfway up the strip where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have a stronghold.

That would mean that food aid brought in via the dock would still have to pass through an IDF checkpoint at the Netzarim corridor, a military road that bisects the strip and which has been a chokepoint stopping humanitarian deliveries reaching the north.

Some UN and other humanitarian officials fear the aid will be diverted south to camps set up for the more than a million people now sheltering in Rafah.

The IDF wants them to move out so it can conduct an offensive there against Hamas units.

Such an offensive would inevitably mean temporary closure of Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings in southern Gaza, so the US-made floating dock would serve as a substitute, while at the same time diverting pressure on Israel to open northern crossing points to substantial aid traffic.

"One of the key arguments for having a dock was to put it further north so that suppliers could come in more directly to the north," a UN official said, adding that what was actually being proposed looked more like a "smokescreen to enable the Israelis to invade Rafah".