This is part one of three essays examining the Gaza Pier, and the pasts and present futures of imperial theft, by many names. You can find the second part of the series, “Mission Accomplished” here

TL;DR/Key Points:

• The $300 million-plus pier built in Gaza is an architecture of US imperialism
• Key is the use of the pier in the Nuseirat massacre
• Palestinian presence is being erased to create infrastructure used by Israel to appropriate land and resources such as natural gas

A quick search for “Nuseirat massacre” provides the Text Result: 2024 Nuseirat Rescue Operation. Subtext: Attack. 

Here, a stark example of how Google’s “Knowledge Panel” (rather, the immediate blurbs and empirical—imperial—ordering of news stories, testimonies and opinion pieces) is writing history in the image of the genocidaire. 

The white phosphorous across Gaza and southern Lebanon and acid burning the flesh of babies, the bunker buster bombs dropped on the displaced’s tents, the detonation of libraries, archives, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, aid trucks, greenhouses and gardens, water supplies…History—the colonizer, his story—is in the name of self-defense. 

We know better. We, those who recognize and are actively working against this worlds-ending campaign of annihilation, against the Zionist settler colonial hydra that gnaws at Palestine, ravaging the land and its people for 76 years, and counting. The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and United States military’s so-called “humanitarian pier” project on Gaza’s Mediterranean shore–fully operational for less than one month while costing taxpayers hundreds of millions–is stark material testimony to layered logistics of obliteration.

The (Continued) Bombing of an UNRWA Refugee Camp

On June 8, 2024, the IOF, led by the Yamam commando units, raided the Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir el-Balah, Gaza.[1] The purported aim of this raid was to free four captives. According to Al Jazeera, around 11am, several civilian trucks and cars entered near the camp’s market (Fig. 1), followed by at least seven armored vehicles:

One [truck] was loaded with furniture to appear it was moving displaced people, while another had commercial brand markings. There were also what appeared to be civilian vehicles in the group. To provide air cover, Israeli forces started bombing from above, hitting the busy market the hardest, likely to spread as much panic as possible, as well as inflict maximum casualties.

Witnesses describe how soldiers in the civilian trucks ambushed the area and Gazan journalists including Anas Al-Sharif shared footage of the infiltration. Reports gathered by Al Jazeera indicate that Israeli soldiers were shooting people on sight. While US CENTCOM circulated propagandistic imagery of aid delivery via the pier, alternate views document onshoring equipment (Fig. 2), including the 20mm Land-based Phalanx Weapon System (aka Centurion C-RAM, a rapid-fire gun system manufactured by General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon). This evidence is scaffolded by the IOF’s boasting of close US collaboration during the massacre, circulating that “the US hostage cell played a decisive role in freeing the hostages,” and that it used “high-precision American technology that had not been used before in the process of freeing the hostages.”

Four captives were extracted—taken by IOF helicopter near the US-built pier on Gaza’s shoreline—while more than 274 Palestinians were slaughtered and more than 700 were severely injured, further overwhelming Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. Destruction by disguise, by aid delivery as cover for carnage; Israeli forces were “perfidiously hiding in an aid truck”, UN Special Rapporteur of the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese said, “This is ‘humanitarian camouflage’ at another level,” she wrote on Twitter. Israel denies the accusation.[2] This nonsensical structure was constructed, piloted, delayed, mismanaged, now-shuttered – solely to hasten the butchery of Palestine and its people; the pier, proving integral to the United States military’s collusion with the IOF, expediting Gaza’s decimation. 

Figure 1: “Humanitarian Aid Flow Resumes in Gaza” An image via US CENTCOM (centcom.mil), June 8, 2024, 4:20PM

Figure 2: “Angle is Everything” via MenchOsint on X, June 8, 2024, 5:03PM

A Buffer Zone, The Colonizer’s Corridor

Zionist settler colonial bloodthirst is evidenced of course by the body count, but also by the acceleration of land theft; not in the least including July 3, 2024’s grab of 12.7 sq. kilometers in the Jordan Valley—the largest single appropriation “approved” since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. And land theft, here, used loosely, because this includes the airspace and atmospherics, aquifers, lifeways; the total desecration of Palestinian sovereignty as expedited by the occupier’s insatiable greed. 

We can consider this Gaza pier as a microcosm of the larger ongoing process of pillage. 

Prior to its construction, the IOF and US military bombed and razed[3] al-Mughraqa and al-Zahra to construct the Netzarim Corridor (Route 749) from Salah al-Din Road to the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 3). Its quasi-completion in March 2024 was heralded by IOF officials as vital to “security strategies,” building out a 6.5 kilometer wide buffer zone—rather, another layer of bordering and ordering in the besieged enclave. IOF spokespeople told CNN: the road existed before the war and was being “renovated,” due to armored vehicles “damaging it.” It added that there was: “No beginning and ending.”

Figure 3: Satellite images from October 15th and March 6th show Israel built two roads crossing Gaza east to west, one cutting straight through the territory and one to the north that cuts a more winding path. Via Planet Labs PBC

Defying the imposition of colonial space and time demands centering what they seek to obscure and erase. The corridor’s namesake, the illegal Netzarim settlement established in 1972 on Beer Sheba tribal lands—initially an outpost of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement—was the last settlement evicted on August 22, 2005 under Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan. During the brutal Operation Cast Lead campaign[4] against Gaza in 2009, the settlement was reoccupied by the IOF—effectively separating Gaza City from Southern Gaza. 

While comprehensive analysis of the US Government aiding and abetting Cast Lead, as well as each operation prior and proceeding is beyond this piece’s scope, we can understand the rapid construction of the Netzarim Corridor and Gaza Pier as further expanding US military presence in the eastern Mediterranean Sea with aims of securing unfettered access to natural gas reserves and long-term logistical positioning for military supply lines in Jabal Kayrin (“Site 512”), and throughout the Naqab desert. The delusion is these architectures’ facilitation of humanitarian aid distribution—these are concretizations of ongoing nakba; a brutally sophisticated structure of oppression.

In Pursuit Of Gaza’s Gas

It is undeniable that foundations for this genocide, and in particular, the rabidity behind redeveloping the corridor and anchoring the pier, were laid far before October 7, 2023. Since British Gas’s discovery of the Gaza Marine gas fields in 1999, subsequent explorations determine an estimated one trillion cubic feet of natural gas beneath Gaza’s sea. Palestinian sovereignty over its maritime territory is continually obfuscated—first by the failure of the 1993 Oslo Accords, followed by pipeline construction delays and then Hamas’ victory in the 2007 Palestinian legislative elections which marked the beginning of the IOF’s (16 year, and counting) hyper-militarized naval blockade of Gazan land and sea. 

Colonial imperatives of dispossession and extraction are laid bare in a 2019 report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which “assesses existing and potential Palestinian oil and natural gas reserves that could be exploited for the benefit of the Palestinian people, which Israel is either preventing them from exploiting or is exploiting without due regard for international law” (p. 8). According to UNCTAD, reserves in the Levant Basin, which includes the Gaza Marine (“Zone G”), amounts to approximately 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (net value $453 billion, 2017 prices) and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil (net value $71 billion); this is framed as an opportunity to share approximately $524 billion amongst stakeholders, “in addition to the many intangible but substantive advantages of energy security and cooperation among long-time belligerents.” Put otherwise, the genocide of Palestinians and their land is a sprint for Gaza’s oil.

The long-time belligerent, here, being the United States and its commitment to forever war—perpetual defense contracts—munitions and surveillance technologies massacring millions, costing trillions, while chasing its next hit of oil. 

The Pier’s Plans–Incomplete, Non-Exhaustive, Mission Completed

October 22, 2024: The plan for a maritime route to Gaza via Cyprus to provide humanitarian assistance for Palestinians was initiated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in collaboration with US President Joe Biden, a senior diplomatic source told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday night.

March 7, 2024: US President Biden, State of the Union: The United States has been leading international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters. No U.S. boots will be on the ground. A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.

May 6, 2024: QUESTION: By the way, on the pier itself, it was–it was said over the weekend that it was moved to (inaudible) because of some high winds and waves and so on. Do you have any comment on that? MR MILLER: I’m going to defer to the Pentagon for any of those operational kind of details. QUESTION: Thank you. MR MILLER: They’re the ones that are responsible for constructing and moving it and ultimately launching it.

June 13, 2024: QUESTION: Open-ended question: The pier is set to be dismantled again, due to sea state—do you have any comment on that? MR MILLER: I would defer to my colleagues at the Pentagon who are responsible for the operation of the pier. 

June 25, 2024: QUESTION: And this may be a DOD question, but why does the U.S. continue to offload all of this aid from the pier when the UN is not operating to distribute this aid? MR MILLER: I would defer to DOD on that, who’s the operator there.

July 9, 2024: QUESTION: Okay. And what’s the latest on the Gaza pier? MR MILLER: I would refer you to the Pentagon for that, but they have made clear over the last few days that the Gaza pier is operational, it is receiving aid. I think they had a number of reporters who were actually at the pier over the last couple days. So it’s operational.

July 9, 2024: Pentagon press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a press briefing on Tuesday that the plan was to “tentatively” reattach the pier sometime “this week,” which will “enable the delivery of additional aid into Gaza.” Officials said the pier could be reconnected for the last time as soon as Wednesday [July 10]. But once the remaining aid is delivered, the pier is expected to be removed from the coast of Gaza and the operation, which began in mid-May, will end, officials said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because final details are still being worked out. 

They are going to blame the stockpiles in Cyprus, securitization of staging, the tide, waves, the persistent heavy sea. Persistent, like the bombs that haven’t ceased for 284 days. Persistent, the Zionist lynch mobs, perversive sadism, frozen banking, looted gold and antiquities, pillaged organs, torched fields and olive groves. The supposed over-1,500 tons of aid slated for Gazans, stuck in stasis while talking heads trapeze; as if Erez crossing isn’t sealed and Rafah crossing isn’t decimated and Tsav 9 isn’t blocking Tarkumiya and Qiryat Arba and the complete shuttering of the World Food Programme’s activities isn’t the oppressor’s ultimate aim; extermination by every -cide. 

Just because, for now, the Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore (JLOTS) plan the pier’s “permanent” removal, it’s necessary to view this $300 million-plus sinkhole within the longue durée of the Zionist settler colonial plunder of Palestine, and, the US military’s explicit orchestration and bankrolling of this catastrophe. 

Forthcoming in this essay series—we will further connect JLOTS within logics of forever war; including their usage during the US-led coalition’s occupation of Iraq as well as the Marines’ ongoing occupation and desecration of Indigenous Lumbee, Neusiok, Woccon, and Coree land (Camp Lejeune, North Carolina).   

[1] The scope, scale and speed of this destruction moves faster than any op-ed or article can contain; at time of writing (July 18, 2024—more than nine months into the IOF’s barbaric campaign), at least 46 massacres have occurred on Nuseirat camp since the beginning of the onslaught against the enclave on October 7 —including the July 6 and July 14, 2024 bombings of UNRWA schools and July 17 bombings of homes in the camp that killed dozens and injured hundreds more.

[2] US CENTCOM similarly refuted its personnel and infrastructures’ involvement. The IOF, armed with US-funded and manufactured weapons, demonstrates this was not an isolated tactic. On July 14, 2024, Al-Qassam Brigades declared in a press statement: “We have encountered a special Israeli military force that infiltrated disguised in an aid truck east of Rafah. Our fighters engaged them directly upon their entry into a house, neutralizing all assailants in close combat.”

[3] “Lt. Col. Shimon Orkabi, commander of Battalion “601” of the Combat Engineering Corps, told [Israeli] Channel 14 that the soldiers were busy destroying any remaining infrastructure in the buffer area. ‘It basically opened up this entire space of territory to us, allowing us to control everything that happens in this corridor,’ he said. He added that the Israeli military used a “large amount of mines and explosives” to demolish buildings in the buffer zone, and that the remaining buildings in the area will “probably disappear soon.’” (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/08/middleeast/israel-building-road-splitting-gaza-cmd-intl/index.html)

[4] It is worth noting several key elements in the IOF’s cache for Cast Lead: General Dynamics’ F-16 fighter jets, Boeing’s AH-64 Apache Helicopters, Boeing’s Mark 85 Joint Direct Attack Munition and GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs, Rafael’s Typhoon Weapons System and Spike ER electro-optically guided anti-armor missiles, and the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozers.