Biden’s port, wasn’t actually his idea- According to Israeli media the port was Bibi Netanyahu’s brain child
I’ve listened to Pepe Escobar, the Duran, and read some news articles. The Gaza Port is not really intended to feed the starving Palestinians. That’s not it’s goal. There is already a way to get food into Gaza. Open the Rafah crossing and let the aid pour in.
- The Port is a stall tactic and serves as a way to completely cut off Palestinians in Gaza from their sole land crossing with Egypt
- Leaving them completely isolated from any one else, save Israel. While making these human beings dependent on the largess of Israel.
- While also, conveniently and openly putting American “boots on the ground”
Electronic Intifida
Tamara Nassar Power Suits 14 March 2024
The first aid ship set sail from Cyprus to the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after US President Joe Biden announced plans for a maritime corridor to the coastal enclave.
The ship is carrying about 200 tons of food, water and medicines.
The United Arab Emirates is funding the mission, which is organized by the US-based World Central Kitchen charity. The ship is supplied by a Spanish organization by the name of Proactive Open Arms.
The ship and its accompanying barge should arrive at a coast in northern Gaza within two days at most, and will dock at a jetty built by the Spanish charity.
“Tonight, I’m directing the US military to an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters,” Biden said during the State of the Union address last week.
“A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day,” Biden added.
The “temporary” port, which officials said would take 30 to 60 days to build, would be attached to a temporary causeway at the coast of Gaza.
The US dispatched the first logistics vessel on 9 March carrying equipment to build the pier.
Famine engineers endorse plan
The “Amalthea Initiative” will see Israel taking part in the inspection of goods in Cyprus before ships are routed towards the Gaza coast.
And
the Israeli military will be managing the “security” for the port, Biden said.“
Who is going to provide security for the port you’re planning to build to offer aid in Gaza?”a reporter asked Biden as news of the port plans broke.
“The Israelis,” the US president responded.The Jerusalem Post said the maritime corridor plan was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s idea, citing an unnamed “senior diplomatic source.”
Netanyahu had reportedly first proposed the plan to Biden in October, and pressed the issue again with the US president in January.
“This source, close to the prime minister, insinuated that Biden was simply implementing a plan by Netanyahu, not actually initiating anything new,” the Post reported.
While touring Gaza’s coast in a naval vessel on Sunday, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant expressed enthusiasm about the plans of a maritime corridor.
“The process is designed to bring aid directly to the residents and thus continue the collapse of Hamas’s rule in Gaza,” he said.
Gallant was reportedly briefed alongside the Israeli navy commander and the head of COGAT, Israel’s bureaucratic arm of the military occupation, on Sunday about the logistics of building the port.
It was the same Gallant who announced on the third day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza that Israel would be “imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed.”
“We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” he said at that time, speaking of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians, half of whom are children, and most of whom are refugees from areas beyond the Gaza boundary.
Political motivations
But why would Israel, the engineer of the Gaza famine, endorse the idea of establishing a maritime corridor for aid to address a crisis it initiated and is now worsening?
This might appear paradoxical if one were to assume that the primary aim of the maritime corridor is to deliver aid.
Palestinians in Gaza received the news about the planned port with fear and suspicion.
Analysts have speculated that this could be a ploy to eliminate Egypt as an outlet between the Gaza Strip and the rest of the world, and sever the coastal enclave’s reliance on Egypt economically and politically by way of the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing – the sole point of exit and entry for most people in Gaza.
This would ostensibly complete Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip without dependence on Egyptian cooperation, reliable as it may have been.
Abdel Bari Atwan, a Gaza-born world-renowned Palestinian journalist, invoked the US-facilitated evacuation of thousands of Palestinian guerilla fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut in 1982 as an insight into what these plans could possibly suggest.
Palestinian fighters were transferred by US warships off the Beirut coast to Cyprus and eventually to Tunisia.
Atwan indicated that the maritime corridor would create a pathway for the forcible evacuation of Palestinians by sea.
Other analysts have expressed similar fears.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken implicitly denied speculation that this move would permanently close the border at Rafah and the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing, during a press briefing on Wednesday.
“And I want to emphasize: It is a complement to – not a substitute for – other ways of getting humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” Blinken said.
Then open the border crossings and get the aid flowing!!
“And, in particular, overland routes remain the most critical way to get assistance in and then to people who need it.”
Then open the border crossings and get the aid flowing!!
Those assurances will do little to assuage concerns. If and when the American and Israeli-controlled port is in place, there is no telling what Tel Aviv and Washington may then do.
Let’s say Israel starts it’s massive bombing campaign, directing the fleeing terrorized human beings towards the port and … they will be relocated. Ethnically cleansed.
“Glaring distraction”
Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, slammed what he called “absurd” US plans for getting aid into Gaza, whether through airdrops or the temporary port.
“From a humanitarian perspective, from an international perspective, from a human rights perspective, it is absurd in a dark, cynical way,” he said.
Human rights groups have dismissed announcements of building a temporary pier as a distraction from Israel’s systemic and deliberate policy of starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
“The proposed maritime humanitarian corridor and temporary seaport is another tool to weaponize aid,” the Palestinian refugee advocacy group Badil said.