In March 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address that the U.S. would be building a temporary “floating pier” on the Gaza shoreline to deliver humanitarian aid to the starving population in Gaza. “No U.S. boots will be on the ground,” he promised.
Since then, however, critics have raised concerns that the pier is not only being used for “humanitarian” purposes but is being employed for military activities that aid in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
An intelligence source from within the resistance in Gaza, who spoke to Mondoweiss under conditions of anonymity, says there are mounting signs the U.S. pier could also be used to forcibly displace Palestinians. This would provide an alternative to the original Israeli plan of forcing Palestinians into the Sinai, which was rejected by Egypt early on in the war.
“The floating pier project is an American solution to the displacement dilemma in Gaza,” the source said. “It goes beyond both the Israeli solution of displacing Gazans into Sinai…and the Egyptian suggestion of displacing [Gazans] into the Naqab [desert].”
Instead, the source said, the U.S. pier would be used to facilitate the displacement of Gazans to Cyprus, and then eventually to Lebanon or Europe.
These concerns have been brought into sharp relief after the Israeli army committed a massacre in Nuseirat refugee camp last weekend, killing at least 274 Palestinians in order to retrieve four Israeli captives.
The U.S. pier was at the center of coverage of the massacre, as multiple news sources, videos, and eyewitness accounts from Gaza indicated that U.S. forces may have been involved in the operation and that humanitarian trucks entering Nuseirat were hiding the Israeli soldiers that carried out the massacre. Live Aljazeera footage depicted what appeared to be a humanitarian truck driving through the camp accompanied by two armored military vehicles, while other videos circulated showing Israeli soldiers using a helicopter allegedly in the area of the U.S. floating pier as an evacuation point, taking advantage of U.S. air defenses.
The claim was quickly dismissed by U.S. Central Command, but Palestinian factions such as the Popular Resistance Committees said it would be treating the pier as a military target moving forward. Following the accusations and the threats, the UN’s World Food Programme has suspended aid deliveries through the pier, citing concerns over the security of the WFP team.
‘Humanitarianism’ covering up ethnic cleansing?
The anonymous resistance source told Mondoweiss that “according to our intelligence, the pier will be used to displace Palestinians to Cyprus through evacuation ships and then to Lebanon after undergoing a screening process.”
The source asserted that this plan has already been discussed with Lebanese authorities, and that “it was agreed with Najib Mikati, the Lebanese Prime Minister, to receive $1 billion in aid to Lebanon to be paid through the European Union, with an additional $250 million to be paid to his own companies.”
In exchange, Lebanon would receive “between 100,000 and 200,000 Gaza residents through the floating pier via Cyprus, which is expected to take place during the fall this year,” the source said.
According to the source, the background to this alleged arrangement is part of a broader “pressure cooker” strategy being enacted on the people of Gaza, “starting with the halting of money transfers as of last Ramadan and continuing with the current Israeli control over and closure of the Rafah crossing until such a time that an American company can take over, as well as the demoralization of the resistance through continuous operations, which is to be followed by allowing an acceptable number of people into Egypt through the Rafah crossing via the Hala Consulting and Tourism company, in order to be naturalized in accordance with the new Egyptian citizenship law.”
The next step in this process would then supposedly follow, in which a few hundred thousand Gazans would be transferred from Gaza to Cyprus. Notably, the U.S. is already using Cyprus to load humanitarian aid into cargo ships and transport it to the pier.
“They are expected to leave for Cyprus in waves and to mix with other illegal immigrants from Syria, after which they will either be assisted in making the journey of illegal migration to Europe — which is opposed by the European Union — or they will be sent to Tripoli and replace the Syrian refugees there, in accordance with the wishes of the Lebanese government,” the source continued. “They would then be resettled in northern Lebanon or Lebanon’s Sunni areas, far away from areas of Hezbollah influence and control.”
The source emphasized that such a scenario is not without precedent, as previous waves of Palestinian immigrants tied to Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, a rival of PA president Mahmoud Abbas, have been settled in Lebanon in the past.
“Previously, there has been animosity between newer waves [of immigrants] and previous Palestinian groups loyal to the resistance,” the source explained. “This has led to conflict in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in the past.”
Finally, the source also stated that alleviating the Syrian crisis and striking a deal with Bashar al-Asad to ease punitive measures for potential Syrian returnees who may have been part of the opposition would help make the prospect of an influx of Gaza refugees more palatable for the Lebanese government, especially if it is tied to an influx of monetary assistance to Lebanon’s faltering economy. Notably, several reports have already emerged that many Syrian refugees are at imminent risk of forcible deportation, and hundreds have already returned amid anti-refugee sentiment in Lebanon.
Mondoweiss has been unable to verify the claims relayed by the anonymous source regarding the potential plan.
Notably, however, Lebanon has been used in the past on a smaller scale for receiving political exiles from Palestine, as in the case of the deportation of 415 Palestinian men affiliated with political factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in 1992, when they were exiled to a no-man’s-land in between northern Palestine and southern Lebanon called Marj al-Zuhur.
Mounting widespread concern
Regardless of whether such a plan comes to pass, different political factions in Gaza have expressed concern regarding the intentions behind the pier, while others have cautiously welcomed it despite reservations.
Hamas welcomed the U.S. project and the efforts to aid Palestinians, but it also emphasized that the pier would not be a reliable alternative to aid through land-based crossings, which is more efficient. Many international organizations have also echoed these concerns, confirming that aid through land crossings remains the most reliable and efficient option. Hamas has also rejected the presence of any foreign military force as part of the pier’s operations.
Other Palestinian political parties such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have come out more strongly against the pier, raising alarms about its potential misuse for the forced displacement of Palestinians or protecting Israeli forces occupying Gaza. The PFLP warned Arabs, internationals, and Palestinians from working on the pier and asserted any troops deployed with the pier would be dealt with as an occupying force.
Likely due to these fears, the pier has already been subject to mortar shell attacks. This is likely a message sent by Palestinian resistance factions that they are ready to deal with the pier militarily if it is used for military purposes rather than for delivering aid.
Since its introduction, the pier has experienced a series of challenges and setbacks. Part of it came loose due to sea conditions, and some of its staff were injured while operating it in unclear circumstances. The pier had to be taken for maintenance just weeks after it was deployed and was relocated back off Gaza a few days ago.
Once fully operational and at full capacity, the pier is expected to deliver 150 trucks into Gaza daily. However, as of this writing, the World Food Programme has continued suspending aid delivery due to the aforementioned safety concerns for WFP teams.
While the U.S. has continuously reasserted its purely “humanitarian” aims, the circumstances surrounding the pier’s creation, including the exclusion of Palestinians from its management, the involvement of Israel in its security, and now the recent suspected U.S. role in the Nuseirat massacre, has all reinforced suspicions among Palestinians concerning the true intentions behind the pier.
Despite the work of Zionist propagandists to invent lachrymose works of historical fiction, the Arabs had accepted the Jews and saved their culture from destruction during the Christian Crusades and Inquisitions. The Ottomans had adopted the Law of Nationality, 1869. It abolished the millet based system of nationality and created a single nationality for Jews, Arabs, and Turks alike:
https://data.globalcit.eu/NationalDB/docs/Ottoman%20Law%20of%20Nationality%201869.pdf
Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin, 1878 had guaranteed all Ottomans equal political and civil rights to hold any office or profession, regardless of religion, and granted right of transit to all pilgrims visiting their holy sites: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Treaty_of_Berlin_Article_62_Status_Quo.png
Muslim, Christian, and Jewish deputies all served in the Ottoman Parliament. One of the Palestinian representatives from the District of Jerusalem, Yussef Diya’uddin Al-Khalidi, had even been the Speaker of the Ottoman Parliament. The Deputies debated and helped formulate state policies. For example, there was a discussion in the Ottoman Parliament in 1911 in which two deputies from Jerusalem, al Khalidi and al Husayni, argued with Jewish deputies that the district of Palestine had absorbed enough Zionist colonists, and they should be settled elsewhere in the region or Ottoman Empire. See Yuval Ben-Bassat and Eyal Ginio, Late Ottoman Palestine: The Period of Young Turk Rule (Library of Ottoman Studies), 2011, starting at page 111
Nothing in Article 22 of the Treaty of Versailles that created the League of Nations, applied the “sacred trust of civilization” to any Jewish communities located outside of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq that had “formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire.”
The Great Powers that endorsed the “national home for the Jewish people” ascertained from Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist delegation at Versailles that terminolgy did not require the establishment of an autonomous Jewish government or Jewish state: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Parisv04/d9
The San Remo resolution required a legal undertaking from the British government in addition to the ones mentioned in the Mandate that protected all of the pre-existing political rights of the non-Jewish communites of Palestine. The Mandate only allowed other Jews to immigrate subject to suitable conditions and prohibited their settlement on state or waste lands required for the public’s use.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minutes_of_the_1920_Conference_of_San_Remo.pdf
So the San Remo resolution and Mandate did not envision or authorize foreign Jews having unrestricted immigration, a government, or a state in Palestine as Israelis have claimed: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b1esz2t4c
Dear God! I hope the evacuation plans are just the figments of someone’s overwrought imagination. Last week’s European Parliament elections resulted in a distinct shift to the right over immigration, causing Macron to call a panicky general election in France. Even though the UK will make a welcome shift leftwards next month, the odious Nigel Farage is trying to make the election about immigration. No one is going to welcome 100,000 or more Gazan refugees, especially if the main reason they are refugees is because Biden lacks the balls to rein in Netanyahu and his fellow Israeli fascists.
Of course, that was the plan all along. Why would you need a pier when aid could easily be transported over land, Primary responsibility for the horrors being experienced rests not with the disgusting war criminals in Israel, but with the US and other western countries that have allowed the conflict to fester for decades. How many times did the US say settlements are unhelpful. Well, what did you do about it? You stoked the fire by providing more weapons and providing diplomatic cover to facilitate Israel’s genocide project which has been active for decades.
The sociopaths running Israel are the antithesis of Jewish humanistic values.
I said some time ago…I SMELL A RAT!!! When America offers to ‘help’…first it figured out how to PROFIT from this ‘help’. And not only this…an opening for US continued expansion in the Middle East.
The day the West defined ‘success’ as a massacre of 270 Palestinians
Israelis dance in the streets, the White House hails a ‘daring’ operation, Sunak says he’s relieved.
How carnage in Gaza has become the new normal.
By Jonathan Cook
“Israel hasn’t just crossed the Biden administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp at the weekend, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.
On Saturday, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its 7 October attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
The true death toll may never be known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from the bombardment, crushed to death, or trapped and suffocating, or expiring slowly from dehydration if they cannot be dug out in time.
Many hundreds more are suffering agonising injuries – should their wounds not kill them – in a situation where there are almost no medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an aid blockade.”
“According to reports, the bloody Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of them possibly an American citizen.
n comments to the Haaretz newspaper published on Sunday, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in.” ‘
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/06/12/the-day-the-west-defined-success-as-a-massacre-of-270-palestinians/15/