The Pentagon will temporarily suspend aid deliveries to Gaza via an American-built, $320 million temporary pier that was damaged by rough weather and seas in recent days. 

“Due to high sea states and a North African weather system, earlier today, a portion of the Trident pier separated from the pier that is currently anchored into the coast of Gaza,” the deputy Pentagon press secretary, Sabrina Singh, told reporters on Tuesday. “As a result, the Trident pier was damaged and sections of the pier need rebuilding and repairing.”

In its less than two weeks of operations, the pier has faced setbacks including three injured American service members, including one who remains in critical condition. The Pentagon said it is working to recover several vessels that were beached near the pier. 

Over the next 48 hours, the Trident pier will be “removed from its anchored position on the coast and towed back to Ashdod where U.S. Central Command will conduct repairs,” Ms. Singh added, noting that the repairs will take more than a week and then the pier will need to be re-anchored to the Gaza coast. 

The Pentagon said the pier proved “highly valuable” in delivering aid and thus is intended to be re-anchored so that aid to Gaza can resume. 

“To date, over 1,000 metric tons have been delivered from the pier to the marshaling area for onward delivery by humanitarian organizations and into the hands of Palestinians,” Ms. Singh added while noting that the Pentagon hopes to get aid to Gaza as quickly as it can. 

When asked about aid that hasn’t yet been delivered through the pier but was intended to be over the next week, Ms. Singh said some of it is “being loaded into vessels” so that it is in position to move through once the pier is re-anchored, while some of the aid’s future will be determined in conversations with USAID about how to get it into Gaza. While the pier has been “effective,” she said, land routes are “the most efficient way” to move aid.

“You guys put a lot of money into this and then it didn’t last, it lasted for less than two weeks,” one attendee at the press conference said, asking whether “poor planning and poor quality” materials could have contributed.

“Over 1,000 metric tons of aid got to the people in Gaza, so I don’t think that’s a total loss,” Ms. Singh responded, adding that it was important to get aid in by “whatever means.”

Last week, however, a Pentagon official stated that hundreds of tons of aid meant to be delivered to Gazans via the pier never reached its intended recipients. Much of it, a Pentagon spokesman said, was looted from food trucks leaving the staging area or commandeered by Hamas terrorists.  

“If you want to characterize it as a failure, I leave it to you, what I can tell you is that we don’t control the weather,” she said, adding that “an unfortunate, unique pattern of events with high seas and another storm that came in” caused it to be inoperable.