In a story penned Monday and updated Tuesday morning, Reuters’s Michelle Nicholas explained things haven’t exactly gone swimmingly (pun intended) for aid coming from a U.S.-constructed pier into Hamas-controlled Gaza as 11 out of 16 trucks on Saturday never made it to their intended destinations (and thus, being able to reach storage) as they were raided along the way. As such, by Monday afternoon, no delivers came through since Saturday.
Not surprisingly, the pro-Hamas liberal networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC omitted this from coverage of the war in their flagship Monday night and Tuesday morning newscasts.
“Food and medicine for Palestinians in Gaza are piling up in Egypt because the Rafah crossing remains closed and there has been no aid delivered to a U.N. warehouse from a U.S.-built pier for two days, U.N. officials warned on Monday,” Nicholas said in her lede.
Of course, the story had to have an anti-Israel tilt as the next graph cited a United Nations official to kvetch there’s been “insufficient supplies and fuel to...Gaza as they endure Israel's military onslaught against Hamas militants.”
But why is that?
Nicholas provided one of the answers a few lines later: “Egypt said on Monday that the crossing is closed due to the threat posed to aid work by Israel's military operation.”
After again blaming Israel, she arrived at the heart of the matter with the pier:
The U.N. agreed to assist in coordinating aid distribution from the floating pier, but has remained adamant that deliveries by land are the best way to combat the crisis.
The U.N. said that 10 truckloads of food aid - transported from the pier site by U.N. contractors - were received on Friday at a World Food Programme warehouse in Deir El Balah in Gaza.
But on Saturday, only five truckloads made it to the warehouse after 11 others were cleaned out by Palestinians during the journey through an area that a U.N. official said has been hard to access with humanitarian aid.
(....)
The U.N. did not receive any aid from the pier on Sunday or Monday.
The reactions on Twitter didn’t disappoint. Foundation for the Defense of Democracies senior fellow Bill Roggio tweeted that “[t]he Gaza aid pier may be the most expensive piece of performance art ever created. This was destined to fail. Our tax dollars hard at work. For Hamas.”
Free Beacon contributor Noah Pollak brought more of the facts to bear: “The US taxpayer-provided $320m Gaza pier is an ongoing terror finance violation by the Biden administration and administered by CENTCOM. We ship aid to Hamas that it ‘steals’ and sells in Gaza to finance its terror war. There should be hearings.”
Longtime Florida political reporter Marc Caputo (now with the Bulwark) had perhaps the best take: “Well, we can’t say for sure Hamas stole this aid[.] I mean, should we suspect a terrorist group that staged a murder, rape & kidnapping raid —only to then hide among civilians in one of earth’s densest urban areas— of stealing from the very population it rules through fear?”
