Joe Biden Faces Backlash Over Broken Gaza Pier: 'Humiliation'

President Joe Biden is facing backlash after a U.S.-built temporary pier on the shores of the Gaza Strip, set up to provide a lifeline to the Palestinian territory, will now be removed for repairs after breaking apart rough seas and weather.

The Pentagon said Tuesday that the $320 million pier, which had only been operating for two weeks, will now be pulled from the beach and sent to Ashdod in southern Israel for repairs.

The pier, located just southwest of Gaza City, is one of the few ways that food and supplies are reaching starving Palestinians amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

"From when it was operational, it was working, and we just had sort of an unfortunate confluence of weather storms that made it inoperable for a bit," Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said. "Hopefully just a little over a week, we should be back up and running."

The setback was met with immediate backlash on social media. Many questioned why more efforts aren't being made by the U.S. and Israel to reach more Palestinians with humanitarian aid by land.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on X, formerly Twitter, "It was a massive humiliation for Biden that Israel wouldn't let the U.S. deliver aid to Gaza by land and forced the U.S. to build this pier to try to get small amounts in. That it couldn't even be done properly and is now broken and floating in the sea is yet more humiliation."

"Why was a pier needed in the first place? There are land crossings, aid should be able to get into Gaza that way. Unless Israel is withholding humanitarian aid. If that's the case, under 620i of the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. is obliged to stop sending Israel weapons," said Nina Turner, a Senior Fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, on X.

"NEW - the U.S. has stopped all humanitarian aid efforts using the DOD-constructed maritime pier, which is now heavily damaged & floating adrift after bad weather. Who'd have thought — maybe it would have been better to simply deliver aid via #Gaza's 7x land crossings?" Charles Lister, Director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute, said on X.

Newsweek emailed the U.S. Department of Defense Tuesday afternoon for additional comment about the pier's closure.

The pier's removal for repair is the latest setback for the Biden administration's initiative.

Over the last two weeks, three U.S. service members have been injured and four vessels have been beached due to heavy seas around the pier, named the Joint Logistics Over The Shore (JLOTS) pier. Two of the service members received minor injuries but the third is still in critical condition, Singh said Tuesday.

Deliveries were halted for two days last week after crowds rushed aid trucks and one Palestinian man was shot and killed.

However, more than 500 metric tons of aid offloaded at the pier has been handed off to humanitarian partners, two-thirds of which are in the process of reaching those in need, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said last week, according to CNN.

The United Nations estimates that at least a quarter of the Gaza Strip population is on the brink of famine.

Biden announced the pier in March with the hope of averting famine in northern Gaza by providing seaborne access for assistance, as calls grew for Israel to ease access for relief supplies into the territory via land routes.

U.S. officials have emphasized that the pier isn't enough to provide the amount of aid that starving Gazans need.

The Pentagon said the project involved about 1,000 U.S. service members, mostly from the Army and Navy. One U.S. defense official told Reuters the cost had risen to $320 million—double the original estimate from earlier this year.

This caused concern among some, such as Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee, who told the agency the cost had "exploded" and was a "dangerous effort with marginal benefit."

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