International
‘Amateur Hour’: Biden Admin’s Floating Gaza Pier Problems Go From Bad To Worse
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From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By JAKE SMITH
New problems are mounting for the Biden administration’s $320 million floating Gaza aid pier which was already facing setbacks, despite becoming operational less than two weeks ago.
The U.S. military was forced to halt aid shipments to Gaza on Tuesday after the floating pier was damaged by bad weather over the weekend. The damage sustained from the bad weather is only the latest in a string of logistical and operational problems that have plagued the pier since it was constructed in mid May.
The JLOTS pier was a “horrible idea,” Michael DiMino, senior fellow at Defense Priorities and former CIA and defense official, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s a horrible idea due to the challenges that we just saw basically wreck the whole project.”
“It was never a sound plan to begin with… whether it’s accidents, or logistical hurdles, or risk to our troops and all these problems that have come to fruition. I don’t think that there should be any effort to try to continue this, or salvage it, or fix it,” DiMino said, pointing to safer, more effective methods of delivering aid to Gaza. “I think now is an opportunity to say this failed. Let’s wrap this up before we continue to tempt fate.”
Biden's floating pier in Gaza appears to be sinking pic.twitter.com/bN8WxSZLXh
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 28, 2024
Getting aid into Gaza via the JLOTS system requires several steps. Aid is first delivered by vessels to the floating pier off the shores of Gaza, where it is facilitated by U.S. officials. It is then picked up by loading vessels and transferred back to a separate causeway pier attached to the shores of Gaza, then trucked by various aid groups to warehouses for distribution.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh confirmed that U.S. aid deliveries had been halted after rough weather and choppy waters broke the causeway pier apart on Tuesday, rendering it useless for the time being. The pier will be removed from the coast of Gaza and towed northbound to Israel for repairs; it will take “at least over a week” to fix the pier before it can be re-anchored on the Gaza coastline, Singh told reporters.
“We had a perfect storm of high sea states… creating not an optimal environment to operate this JLOTS pier,” Singh said Tuesday, responding to a question as to whether the pier is too fragile to withstand tough conditions. “Hopefully weather conditions won’t hinder it anymore [once it is operational again].”
The pier can only be operated during favorable sea conditions, in a maximum of three-foot waves and wind speeds not higher than 15 miles per hour. Aside from the minimum week timeline, reconstruction efforts cannot take place if sea conditions are poor, possibly adding further delays
The incident comes just a day after a separate stint of bad weather unmoored four U.S. Army vessels supporting the JLOTS system and sent them floating away from the operational site off the coast of Gaza. Two vessels floated north and were beached in Ashdod, Israel, while the other two anchored on the Gaza coast near the causeway. One of the vessels has been recovered, and the other three will be recovered by Thursday, Singh told reporters during Tuesday’s press briefing.
A video from the incident appears to depict U.S. soldiers from one of the beached vessels in Gaza stranded on the shores of Gaza while awaiting rescue, despite the Biden administration’s promise that there would be no U.S. “boots on the ground” in the region during JLOTS operations.
“This is amateur hour. It’s unacceptable that there’s so little planning that appears to have gone into this, to the point where half a dozen U.S. troops are washed ashore in a war zone surrounded by Hamas,” DiMino told the DCNF.
That problem was proceeded by another incident last week in which three U.S. troops suffered injuries during JLOTS operations. While exact details haven’t been disclosed — other than that it was a non-combat incident — two of the troops suffered minor injuries and the third was critically injured and subsequently evacuated to an Israeli hospital for emergency care; he is still in critical condition, Singh said Tuesday.
Days after the JLOTS system was constructed, shipments that made it to the shores of Gaza via the causeway and floating pier were quickly stolen off of trucks by crowds of hungry civilians, creating security concerns among aid groups responsible for distribution. The United Nations and U.S. have discussed alternate routes for trucks to transfer aid to warehouses in lieu of the incident.
There are also security concerns for the U.S. troops supporting the JLOTS operations. Pentagon officials, including Department of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, have admitted there is a baseline risk that Hamas operatives on the ground in Gaza could stage an attack on the causeway or fire at troops offshore.
More broadly, only a fraction of the aid needed to address the humanitarian needs of the millions of Palestinians in Gaza can be delivered via the JLOTS system, even when fully operational. U.S. officials have said that roughly 90 trucks worth of aid will be delivered to Gaza via JLOTS in the interim, and eventually up to 150 trucks once the system is at full capacity.
But the UN previously told the DCNF in a statement that hundreds of trucks of aid are needed on a daily basis.
“That makes the pier a relative drop in the bucket at best — a waste of $320 million American taxpayer dollars and the futile deployment of 1,000 U.S. service personnel,” Shoshana Bryen, senior policy director at the Jewish Policy Center, previously told the DCNF.
It is far safer and more effective to deliver aid to the Palestinians through other methods, chiefly by truck convoys through border crossings in Egypt to the south and Israel to the west, of which there are several. The international community has expressed concern that Israel and Egypt are not allowing enough aid to enter through these crossings, though Israel counters that it is already going to great lengths to ensure delivery; Egypt refused to allow hundreds of trucks worth of aid to enter Gaza through the Rafah border crossing until recently.
conflict
Hamas, Palestinians paraded dead babies coffins through streets before handover to Israel
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MxM News
Quick Hit:
Hamas paraded the caskets of Israeli hostages, including what they claimed were the bodies of a mother and two young children, through the streets of Gaza before handing them over to the Red Cross. Videos show crowds cheering as armed terrorists carried the coffins as part of a prisoner exchange with Israel.
Key Details:
- Videos from Khan Younis, Gaza, show Hamas and other terrorists parading four caskets, including those of two young children, before handing them to the Red Cross.
- Crowds cheered as the terrorists, armed and unmasked, carried the coffins, with celebratory music playing in the background.
- The deceased were identified as members of the Bibas family, including the youngest hostages from the October 7 attack.
ANIMALS: Hamas paraded the bodies of murdered Israeli babies in coffins while blasting loud music during their celebration today when they handed the bodies over to the Red Cross. pic.twitter.com/CoTV5Rzep7
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 20, 2025
Diving Deeper:
During a ceremony in Khan Younis, Gaza, Hamas paraded the caskets of Israeli hostages through the streets, including what they claimed were the bodies of a mother and her two small children. The display occurred before the remains were handed over to the Red Cross as part of a prisoner exchange agreement with Israel. Crowds of Gazans were seen cheering and celebrating as the coffins were carried by armed terrorists.
Videos from the event show masked militants loading a casket into a Red Cross aid truck, while another militant, adorned with symbols of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, filmed the procession. Another video shows adults and children waving and celebrating as Hamas fighters, armed and in trucks, paraded through the streets. Reuters footage also captured members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) helping carry a casket, highlighting the involvement of multiple terrorist factions in the display.
Hamas presented the bodies as those of the Bibas family, who were captured during the October 7 attack. The children, aged four years and less than one year, were among the youngest hostages taken during the brutal assault that triggered the ongoing 15-month conflict. The fourth body was identified as 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz, according to Jewish News Syndicate. Hamas has repeatedly blamed the deaths on Israeli airstrikes, though no evidence was provided to support the claim.
Israel and Hamas are currently observing a temporary ceasefire agreement, facilitating the exchange of civilian hostages for Palestinian prisoners. Despite the ceasefire, Hamas has continued to celebrate the October 7 attacks, which resulted in the largest mass killing of Jewish people since the Holocaust. During the ceremony, a stage displayed a poster depicting Israel as a “Nazi Army,” underscoring Hamas’s longstanding agenda of hostility towards the Jewish state.
The shocking parade of caskets, accompanied by celebratory music and cheering crowds, has drawn international condemnation and further underscored the brutal nature of Hamas’s actions. As the exchange process continues, the emotional toll on the families of the victims remains immeasurable.
Health
RFK Jr: There’s no medical justification for vaccinating one-day-old babies for Hepatitis B
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From LifeSiteNews
‘Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted from having sex with multiple partners in gay sex, or from sex workers, or intravenous drug use,’ explained the new HHS head. ‘Why would you give that to a baby?’
In a widely-viewed video shared on social media, the new U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., asserted that the majority of vaccines — including those he sees as unjustifiably being mandated for infants — have been developed primarily to create profits for Big Pharma.
“Most of the vaccines after 1989 were added not for public health reasons but for pharmaceutical profit reasons,” said Kennedy.
“Why are we vaccinating one-day-old babies for Hepatitis B?” he asked.
“Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted from having sex with multiple partners in gay sex, or from sex workers, or intravenous drug use,” he said, reemphasizing, “Why would you give that to a baby?”
According to Kennedy, Pharmaceutical giant Merck was directed by both the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to develop the Hepatitis B vaccine for “those vulnerable populations.”
He explained that when those populations showed little interest in the vaccine, “Merck went back to the agencies and said ‘You told us to develop this vaccine, but nobody’s buying it.”
“The CDC said, ‘Don’t worry’” recounted Kennedy, “we’ll just recommend it for children and we’ll force everybody to buy it.”
“So, that’s how it got on the [childhood vaccine] schedule,” he said, declaring, “There’s no medical justification.”
RFK JR: “Merck went back to the agencies and said you told us to develop this [Hepatitis B] vaccine. Nobody's buying it. And CDC said don't worry, we'll just recommend it for children. We'll force everybody to buy it. That's how it got on the schedule.” pic.twitter.com/JTmATn8UbP
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 21, 2025
Kennedy has previously explained just how lucrative government-mandated children’s vaccines have been for the pharmaceutical industry:
There’s no downstream liability, there’s no front-end safety testing – that saves them a quarter billion dollars – and there’s no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year.
What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule that we don’t need. Most of these vaccines are unnecessary. Many of them are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.
It was a gold rush, because if you get onto that schedule, it’s a billion dollars a year for your company.
And in many cases, NIH is earning the royalties.
According to Kennedy, more obscene than the huge profits being horded by Big Pharma are the vast number of negative side-effects from all those untested vaccines.
“Neurological diseases” have “exploded,” he said.
“ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy. These are all things that I never heard of,” said Kennedy. “Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation according to CDC data to one in every 34 kids today.”
Kennedy is known for vehemently opposing vaccines without proper knowledge for those taking them, a stance he adopted after the mothers of vaccine-injured children implored him to look into the research linking thimerosal to neurological injuries, including autism. He went on to found Children’s Health Defense, an organization with the stated mission of “ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure,” largely through vaccines.
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