Can Biden Keep American Troops Out of the Line of Fire in Gaza?

With the U.S. military preparing to attach a long-anticipated floating pier to deliver aid to the shores of war-torn Gaza in the coming days, U.S. forces could find themselves at risk of being dragged directly into an intensifying conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement.

President Joe Biden has vowed to keep U.S. personnel off the ground and out of harm's way, but the Pentagon has acknowledged that hostile fire was a possibility and reports have already emerged of mortar attacks taking place in the vicinity of the pier's construction. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers in April that U.S. forces have permission to return fire if attacked, a scenario that has already unfolded in clashes with other pro-Palestinian forces over the past seven months in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Dana Stroul, who served as Biden's deputy assistant defense secretary for the Middle East until December, told Newsweek that, "in any situation in which U.S. forces could be targeted, force protection is the highest priority," and, "in the Gaza mission, as in any mission, American forces are always authorized to defend themselves if they are targeted."

Stroul, now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, highlighted the significant amount of work that has gone into the $320 million project, arguing that "U.S. military planners have worked for months on a plan that should be able to safely facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza without putting American forces directly on the beach, and U.S. forces have worked to construct the floating pier for weeks without being directly targeted by Hamas."

Still, she too noted that the threat of an inadvertent confrontation was significant, particularly given the unpredictable nature of the war ravaging the 25-mile-long coastal strip of Palestinian territory.

"That being said, the risk of miscalculation is always high in dynamic and fluid conflict situations, and Hamas missiles ranges extend beyond the floating pier," she added. "Nor does Hamas control every armed actor in Gaza who might try to spoil and impede the delivery of aid."

The deployment, officially known as "Operation Neptune Solace," marks the latest effort by the Biden administration to accelerate the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Since March, U.S. military planes have conducted missions alongside international partners to airdrop aid packages into the Palestinian territory, but humanitarian workers on the ground warn that local needs exceed the level of shipments, especially as aid trucks continue to run into frequent obstacles, including both Israeli and Palestinian attacks at border crossings as well as blockades put up by Israeli protesters.

The sea route seeks to provide a sustainable pathway for assistance that bypasses these challenges. However, it also comes with its own logistical complexities.

Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer specializing in strategic planning and now serving as senior fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, pointed out that the floating pier system, officially called Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore (JLOTS), has long been a feature of training exercises and humanitarian missions. But this may be the first time it's been put into practice in an active war zone.

"It's usually not used when you're in a hot war kind of environment like this," Clark told Newsweek. "Usually, you envision this being used in a permissive area where you just don't have the facilities to bring a big ship up to the shore."

Clark explained that, in the case of Gaza, large cargo ships in the Mediterranean Sea would offload shipments of humanitarian assistance a couple of miles offshore onto trucks being carried by smaller landing craft operated by the U.S. Army. These landing craft would then transport the trucks to the pier, from which the vehicles could reach supply lines on land.

Weather permitting—and recent bouts of rough seas have already hampered the construction timeline—cargo ships could typically conduct the offloading further out to sea to avoid potential mortar fire, Clark said. And while the faster-moving landing craft would prove tough targets at sea for the kinds of rocket systems typically employed by Palestinian militias, he noted that the pier itself only extends about a mile offshore at most, making both the structure and any craft docked to it easy targets for actors who may seek to disrupt the operation.

"Once you figure out how to target it, you could attack pieces of it pretty easily," Clark said. "And then normally what U.S. forces would do is just go after and attack whoever is shooting at you. Here, they don't have that ability because they've left that entirely to the Israelis."

"So, what we'll need to have is coordination between the operation that's offloading the material and the Israeli Defense Forces that might have to go and do counterattacks against people who are shooting at the pier in an effort to stop the inventory and shipments, which can certainly happen, but that's a level of complication that will slow the response," he added.

The JLOTS system, composed of replaceable intersecting parts, is easier to repair by nature than most permanent pier structures. Yet sustained threats could endanger the operation as a whole and prove a costly setback for the Biden administration.

"I think the more important consideration would be does this operation fail?" Clark said. "And then not only have we put people at risk and potentially got people hurt, but you spent $320 million on this JLOTS system deployment that really failed to make a difference. That's the bigger concern."

Another variable would be the entrance of other forces of the broader Iran-aligned
"Axis of Resistance" coalition that have demonstrated a capacity to both strike at U.S. troops and conduct longer-range missile and drone attacks from hundreds of miles away.

The site of the pier remains a further target than any location that has known to have been hit thus far by such groups operating from Iraq, Syria and Yemen, but the pier is well within range of the weapons of the Lebanese Hezbollah, currently engaged in daily cross-border clashes with Israel. Meanwhile, Yemen's Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi movement, vowed last week to begin the "fourth stage of escalation" in its ongoing maritime offensive against ships deemed to be supporting Israel by expanding attacks into the Mediterranean in solidarity with Hamas and other Gaza factions.

No group, including Hamas, Hezbollah or Ansar Allah, has specifically threatened the U.S. military pier operation. They have, however, criticized the U.S. role in supporting Israel throughout the conflict and have warned of direct attacks should the U.S. military become more closely involved in the war.

Such a prospect marked a point of concern for Eran Etzion, who previously served as deputy head of Israel's National Security Council in the Prime Minister's Office and head of planning at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. He argued that U.S. forces "are being sucked in" at a particularly precarious moment for the conflict, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed forward with operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah despite repeated protests from the Biden administration, which has warned of the potential humanitarian consequences.

A report recently published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz further suggested that Israel planned to outsource control of the critical Rafah crossing that connects Gaza and Egypt to an unnamed U.S. private security firm, though neither U.S. nor Israeli officials have publicly confirmed this.

"That's very interesting if you put this in conjunction with the fact that the Americans are now building the Gaza port and will probably be also at least taking part in operating it," Etzion, who went on to found the Israel Center for Strategic Futures NGO, told Newsweek.

"So, the U.S. is saying, 'We don't want boots on the ground,' but you will have boots on the ground," he added. "They will not be soldier boots, but there will be American boots in two very critical points of connection between Gaza and the rest of the world."

The Israel Defense Forces, the U.S. Defense Department and the U.S. State Department declined Newsweek's request for comment on potential threats faced by U.S. personnel off the coast of Gaza, reports of a private U.S. firm assuming security duties at the Rafah crossing or the prospect of deconfliction channels between the U.S. military and Hamas.

Newsweek has also contacted Ansar Allah and Hamas for comment.

Shortly after Biden first announced plans for the floating pier during his State of the Union address in March, Hamas senior official and spokesperson Bassem Naim told Newsweek he viewed the move as a "positive step" toward addressing the mounting humanitarian crisis in Gaza, though he argued that "the easiest and shortest way is for Israel to open the land crossings and stop attacking Palestinian civilians who gather to obtain aid."

Naim also asserted at the time that Hamas considered "the United States of America to be a direct partner in the war against our people." And while Hamas officials have noted certain shifts in Biden's position as public fissures emerged between the U.S. and Israel throughout the course of the conflict, the presence of U.S. forces in Hamas-claimed territory has received no welcome from Palestinian fighters.

Michael DiMino, a former CIA military analyst and counterterrorism officer now serving as public policy manager for the Defense Priorities think tank, also questioned the significance of distinguishing between the U.S. having "boots on the ground" or off the shore in Gaza.

"The Biden administration's claim that U.S. troops will be on a pier adjacent to the shoreline in a war zone, rather than 'on the ground,' is a distinction without a difference," DiMino told Newsweek. "Our personnel will be in harm's way no matter what—all without a single vote in Congress."

And given the especially volatile nature of the conflict that began in Gaza but has already drawn in other nations and nonstate actors across the region, he warned the threat of a rapid escalation should be taken seriously.

"There is a non-trivial risk that U.S. troops and contractors are attacked on the Gaza pier, making the entire project nothing more than a vector for the United States to become directly enmeshed in the conflict," DiMino said. "Limited skirmishes and rocket fire can quickly snowball out of control, especially in the event of U.S. casualties."

"In a worst-case scenario," he added. "I wouldn't be surprised if you had U.S. troops establish a beachhead in Gaza if the security situation were to rapidly deteriorate around the pier, or if rescue operations were needed after a catastrophic attack."

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