The U.S. military finished installing a floating pier for the Gaza Strip on Thursday, with officials poised to begin ferrying badly needed humanitarian aid into the enclave besieged over seven months of intense fighting in the Israel-Hamas war.

The final, overnight construction sets up a complicated delivery process more than two months after U.S. President Joe Biden ordered it to help Palestinians facing starvation as food and other supplies fail to make it in as Israel recently seized the key Rafah border crossing in its push on that southern city on the Egyptian border.

Fraught with logistical, weather and security challenges, the maritime route is designed to bolster the amount of aid getting into the Gaza Strip, but it is not considered a substitute for far cheaper land-based deliveries that aid agencies say are much more sustainable. The boatloads of aid will be deposited at a port facility built by the Israelis just southwest of Gaza City and then distributed by aid groups.

  • @gravitas_deficiency
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    1 month ago

    I don’t agree.

    I think this is honestly just the typical boomer “back Israel to the hilt because Jewish people got absolutely fucked by the Holocaust”, while simultaneously flat out ignoring the fact that Israel != all Jewish people.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 month ago

      I’d at it’s more 'there are two regional powers here, Israel and Iran. The more aid we give Israel the easier it makes Iran"

      Edit: weaker* it makes Iran

      Fucking autocorrect.

      • @gravitas_deficiency
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        41 month ago

        And that zero-sum game thinking is idiotic.

        Frankly, if we (read: mainly the US and the UK) made amends with Iran (and I know precisely how enormous of a conditional statement that is), and successfully ameliorate and rationalize their policy towards Israel (i.e. convince them to call off their own frankly genocidal policy towards Israel), that could be the the start of the path towards a much more robust peace in the middle east. It’ll likely take several generations to mellow things to a truly sustainable and reasonable level. But something like that might, I believe, be the start of the path to lasting peace in the Middle East - or at the very least, significantly diminished violence and conflict.

        • @[email protected]
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          51 month ago

          We had a tiny chance when Obama and Rouhani were talking. Hell, at one point we had a treaty. There was a road map and some hope.

          Then Trump fucked it all up for no reason, along with all the other shit he pulled.

          • @gravitas_deficiency
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            1 month ago

            I mean… he fucked it up because one of the primary motivations of his entire goddamn presidency was to just shit in as many punch bowls with which Obama was even remotely affiliated.

            Also, he’s deeply racist, and he’s also sore that Obama got a zinger in at the Press Correspondents dinner that one time (for real - but for one joke that a psychopath took poorly, we might have avoided the Trumpian era).

    • @[email protected]
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      21 month ago

      By that logic, these two things are the same as long as we elect boomer government officials.

      • @gravitas_deficiency
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        31 month ago

        Again, no.

        The two things are being treated as the same by the Biden administration.

        Don’t ignore nuance. Ignoring nuance is what Netanyahu and the Israeli is actively trying to get everyone to do to, in the interest of giving themselves some geopolitical cover for executing their own “final solution” in Gaza.

        Ignoring nuance is also what a lot of other autocrats and populists are trying to do in their own way, including Orban, Modi, Milei, Fico (to whom I wish a very slow, lengthy, and complicated convalescence), Trump, and Putin - along with much (or most) of the political parties behind them. It’s all in the interest of solidifying autocratic power and wealth, and scapegoating problems on people who are not the root cause of said problems (a common populist tactic).