“According to the most respected measure of these things, 100 percent of the population in Gaza is at severe levels of acute food insecurity. That’s the first time an entire population has been so classified,” Blinken told a press conference in the Philippines, where he is on an official visit.
When there is a severe shortage of food; any food is at risk of being targeted by desperate people. Food is a tier 1 need. It doesn’t matter if the food is being delivered by land or sea. The solution to this is to provide enough food that people know they are not going to starve to death even without resorting to violence to get what food they can
Yeah but that stops Isreali interest in the starvation of others. Won’t be at all surprised to see any aid put at the dock turned away or blocked from being distributed
Agree, but you can get far more aid via ship than trucks or airplanes. That’s why the Seabees are busy building the docks. T rucks and airplanes can only get enough calories in for a group that large to survive. Famine is at hand and the docks are the key.
More aid is irrelevant once you have enough aid. And you can get enough aid in through land. More importantly, we have the roads and trucks to get food in today. We have been using the land route to get food into Gaza for years. The problem is that the most powerful military in the region is blocking the land route.
Now, instead of applying pressure on that military, we are going to spend months building a port to go around them.
By itself that makes sense; except that military is our close ally. We are their biggest shield on the international stage, and biggest supplier of weapons and defensive systems. However, instead of trying to leverage any of that to try and solve the actual barriers to aid delivery, we are going to spend months building a water route.
If this approach ends up working, it would not be because water routes are more efficient. It would ve because the US war ships operating the dock exert enough pressure that Isreal would not dare oppose them.
Of course, even success here only gets food into Gaza. It does not address internal distribution. Ideally, we would use established networks for that. However Israel has running a largly successful campaign to dismantle the only aid network that has been operating at scale within Gaza (unrwa)
What you don’t seem to understand is that the US demanded and recieved Israel’s cooperation and future protection of those docks. Probably pissed off Bibi but so it goes.