The Biden administration is adamant that no U.S. personnel will set foot in Gaza when it starts delivering humanitarian aid from a floating dock, but a proposal for workers from other nations to deliver the aid carries security risks, say one former and two current administration officials.
The concerns are the latest wrinkle in the White House push to get aid to the enclave’s hungry population via a floating dock. U.S. military officials have told NBC News that the first time they heard that the idea for a dock had been greenlit was the day President Joe Biden announced it at the State of the Union address on March 7. When Biden announced it, the Pentagon still did not have an approved plan for how to carry it out, including how to do it safely.
The first ships carrying components of the dock system left for the Mediterranean six days later.
The military intends to build the dock several miles offshore, where civilian ships will offload aid supplies. Then the aid would be loaded into trucks that would drive onto U.S. Army boats and be ferried to a separate temporary pier fixed to the shore.
But since the administration does not want any U.S. boots on the ground, someone else has to get the aid to the sites where it is distributed to Gaza’s residents. One option under consideration, the officials say, is to have drivers and guards from other nations, or private security guards, move the trucks from the pier onto land to distribute the aid, and then drive the empty trucks back to the pier. It has not yet been determined whether the drivers and their security should be Israelis or Palestinians or another nationality.
Once the empty trucks have been returned to the temporary pier, they would be handed back to the Americans, who would then take them out to the floating offshore dock to refill them with aid and start the process again.
The proposal would shield U.S. personnel from the risk of coming under attack inside Gaza, or of firing on any…
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