The short summary of where Israel’s war in Gaza stands this week is that Israel has seized the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing and begun warnings and evacuation of Rafah, followed by bombing, in preparation for the final push to remove Hamas from Gaza. The Biden administration is attempting to impede this operation by touting a supposed ceasefire/hostages agreement with Hamas, warning Israel not to go into Rafah, and withholding a previously-approved and scheduled delivery of munitions to Israel in order to extort Israel’s policy compliance on the Rafah campaign matter.
In case it isn’t clear that Biden is favoring Hamas and its national patrons over Israel, Thursday morning has brought the news that the Biden administration, while halting arms deliveries to Israel, has issued an arms sales waiver to Qatar, Lebanon, and Iraq – nations connected with or dominated by, respectively, Hamas (along with Muslim Brotherhood terror entities), Hezbollah, and Iran.
This is bad enough for Israel. The prostrate American posture displayed by Biden toward enemies of the U.S. in the Middle East has obvious potential to have a reverse-deterrence effect as we might say, on global terrorists targeting the USA.
The Biden administration is also promising that the U.S.-supplied temporary pier for the Gaza coast will be deployed soon, its assembly having been completed in Ashdod this week. As discussed in earlier TOC articles, putting the pier off Gaza is a pretext for establishing a U.S.-affiliated presence in Gaza, with implicit American security and political interests in its wake. It’s a way of gaining leverage over Israel’s policy and strategic decisions for Gaza operations.
We have yet to see what, if anything, Congress will try to do about the withholding of an arms shipment to Israel. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was very upset in a hearing with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Charles Brown (USAF) on Wednesday morning.
Just a few notes on this fast-moving situation. First, I doubt Israel will slow down anything it has planned in Rafah. Seizing the crossing is the kind of signal act that can’t be left to start growing mold and deteriorating with time. It needs to be capitalized on quickly. Securing the Gaza side of the crossing is necessary for sealing Rafah’s back door, and in particular for getting into the tunnels the crossing area is rife with, and preventing them from being used to support Hamas.
Some of that effort will be about rounding up Hamas as it’s trying to flee. But the IDF should be planning to render any return by Hamas to Rafah untenable, and that means attacking Hamas and other usable infrastructure there. Israel hasn’t set up the refugee centers ready to receive large numbers of Gazans from Rafah for no reason. That would be an expensive and time-consuming “show,” if that’s all it were.
It appears that Israel intends to go ahead and get the job done in Rafah – not just hold the crossing, as some sort of bargaining chip in dubious negotiations with Hamas that have no history of producing what Israel needs.
The shipment cut-off
Second, the contents of the arms shipment Biden has halted are directly relevant to the fight in Rafah. The shipment contains 2,000-lb and 500-lb air-delivered bombs, extensively used for the kind of interdiction and tactical bombing the IDF needs to do in military operations in urban terrain (MOUT). The IDF uses JDAM precision guidance kits to ensure state-of-the-art accuracy in ordnance delivery, and although the JDAM kits haven’t been listed as items being withheld in this shipment, they were approved as part of the shipment in question in late March 2024.
According to this week’s reporting, a separate shipment of 6,500 JDAM kits, which is said to have been assembled sometime before January 2024 (but not notified to Congress), is also now in limbo. It isn’t clear if it was ever out of limbo, but the Washington Post is reporting that it’s considered questionable on the same basis as the suspension decision for the previously-approved munitions.
The shipment as approved also reportedly contains artillery rounds and other ammunition, all of which would be needed for fighting in Rafah and fighting Hezbollah, if the terror group opens a second front against Israel from Lebanon.
Note that the suspended shipment is not related to the combined aid package just voted on for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. (In fact, most of the aid to Israel in that package is for future delivery, probably after the current combat phase of operations in Gaza has ended.)
The faithlessness of this Biden move is, of course, off the charts. Much more could be said about that, but most people don’t need help speculating on the motive.
I do want to briefly touch on the administration’s methods, and the impact on the IDF.
Regarding methods, the Wall Street Journal had a key piece of that puzzle in an article on 6 March about how the arms shipments to Israel are being handled. Basically, the shipments since the fall of 2023 have been made in batches small enough that they evade the requirements for prior notification to Congress. Many of them apparently are being arranged using means by which they can fly under the radar, such as transferring arms from existing U.S. stocks, and contracting them as direct commercial sales, rather than under Foreign Military Sales (FMS) cases.
This ensures that there’s little visibility for Congress or the public. But it can also obscure whether anything is actually even happening. The proposed shipment of 6,500 JDAM kits, for example, isn’t documented anywhere that the public can access. We are only taking the administration’s word for it, “leaked” to the Wall Street Journal (and apparently afterward to WaPo), that there really is such a shipment in the works.
This combination of factors makes it easier for the administration to manipulate perceptions about the arms shipments.
Team Biden and the media are also flogging a theme that Israel may not be performing carefully enough, with the bombs in particular, when it comes to collateral damage and casualty rates. (This too goes to method.) The IDF’s casualty rate in Gaza is actually exceptionally low compared to everyone else on earth, starting with the United States.
But just before the leaking began this week on the threat to withhold arms from Israel, an article in The Hill outlined a deadline – one that passes today (8 May) – for the State Department to certify Israeli compliance with U.S. requirements for the use of weapons we sell.
An ingenious feature of this compliance sidelight is that the principal complaint of NGOs about the IDF’s performance has centered on the use of the bombs in the just-halted shipment. (See the CNN link above.)
The NGOs and media complain that Israel uses bombs too powerful for the tasks in Gaza, and doesn’t ensure sufficiently precise delivery, which is what the JDAM kits are for. Thus, withholding the bombs is a punishment for which Biden purports to have a ready pretext, while withholding the JDAM kits is a way of limiting Israel’s access to the most precise means of delivery.
All of that basically boils down to a game being played, but it does portend an extortion situation with Israel: i.e., the Biden administration warning to “Play ball with us or we’ll ratchet up the rhetoric about collateral damage, and cut off your precision-guidance kits.”
This is simply a hybrid-warfare information operation against Israel.
It’s being waged by the U.S. government.
Short note on the IDF’s munitions stocks
At some point it will matter whether Israel can replenish its inventory of the 2,000-lb and 500-lb bombs. (Note that there are also 1,000-lb bombs and a smaller, 300-lb class precision weapon called the Small Diameter Bomb, or SDB. All of these U.S.-made air-delivered munitions have seen use in Gaza in 2023-24, as well as in other operations over the last 15 years.)
The Rafah operation would be likely to use up a considerable portion of Israel’s existing inventory of such munitions. In a February 2024 piece, WSJ cited a U.S. intelligence assessment of what the IDF has on-hand and how long it will last. The relative timeliness of that assessment makes it worth repeating: “According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, the remaining weapons are enough for Israel to sustain 19 more weeks of fighting in Gaza. That span would shrink to days if Israel launched a second front against Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, according to a person familiar with the U.S. assessment.”
There hasn’t been another arms shipment to Israel since February, but the IDF has been going through inventory since then. The period in question has been something of an operational pause, so the rate of use hasn’t been alarming. But as of early May, I would estimate the stocks on-hand would last some 15-16 weeks, without a second front against Hezbollah.
Weird pier
I’m sorry to have to warn you, this is going to hurt.
On Thursday 9 May, the cargo ship M/V Sagamore got underway from Cyprus with the first shipment of humanitarian aid to be transferred ashore to Gaza via the U.S. pier system. The system is incomplete, as we’ll see, but maneuvering the cargo around via a series of stopgaps at sea is intended to get the cargo ashore.
Right away, the actual developments with Sagamore and the floating pier appear to deviate significantly from what the media seem to think the U.S. DOD briefed. Outlets like the New York Times have picked up on this.
The details may not technically differ, but the reality of what Sagamore has done on 9 May doesn’t fit the narrative that the ship is heading to transfer cargo to a pier off Gaza. (It also doesn’t make sense.)
Instead, Sagamore has reported its position on Thursday night as being off Ashdod. This positional report may simply be incorrect, as it appears to reflect a reported speed of “41.7 knots,” which is not credible. The AIS report indicates a departure from Larnaca, Cyprus on 9 May, and an expected arrival in Ashdod on 10 May (see map below).
This would be some miles north of the recently built jetty south of Gaza City. And where is the floating pier? Well, it does appear at the moment to be near the area where Sagamore has supposedly arrived.
A little over a week ago, the temporary pier was being assembled off the Gaza coast (tethered to the U.S. Army ships providing components and a base for the construction team). The temporary jetty ashore with which it will communicate is the one built hastily weeks ago for the World Central Kitchen food deliveries, according to recent video and imagery identifying the shore infrastructure now being installed for the American pier (below).
The jetty is located a few miles south of Gaza City, and imagery shows that the whole surrounding area has been transformed in recent weeks to process the U.S. pier’s operations. The construction ashore is being done by the IDF. The eventual operation of the shore handling enterprise will be done by contractors, with Qatar as a known major funding source. There aren’t (or aren’t supposed to be) any U.S. Army personnel ashore for that endeavor.
The pier project had come under mortar fire when last we touched base with it, although it wasn’t clear if the seaborne pier or the elements ashore had been targeted. My assessment is that it was the elements ashore that were hit (based partly on an Institute for the Study of War report on the initial shelling, which seems clearly to be referring to the jetty protruding from the Gaza coast as “the pier.” It makes sense that Hamas was able to hit the jetty from a firing position ashore, and the U.S. did not indicate American soldiers or the floating pier infrastructure were hit).
That said, about a week ago, the seaborne pier under assembly was moved from the Gaza coast to Ashdod in Israel, reportedly due to high seas (but see below), which were making continued assembly outside of a protected harbor prohibitive.
Interestingly, it was also reported via social media that the “pier” had come under fire again. This second time, it was also unclear whether the pier at sea or the components ashore had been targeted. (Again, I suspect it was the shore components.)
However, an image from a couple of days earlier did show that the seaborne pier operation was within firing range of the shore. The threat from Hamas fire may have been a decision factor for moving the pier assembly to Ashdod.
Observers can be pardoned for taking seriously the social media report of continuing attacks on the “pier” project, even though mainstream media and CENTCOM didn’t pick it up.
That’s especially the case given that the Defense update linked at the top of this article indicates the pier has since been in assembly off the coast from Ashdod, and not in a protected harbor area there.
Was weather really the issue? Continuing to assemble the pier on the open sea would tend to conflict with the explanation that the assembly project was moved to Ashdod because the seas were too rough off the coast.
It’s quite possible that the pier and its support vessels were moved north, away from Gaza, because of the artillery fire from Hamas rather than because of the weather.
Now, as of Wednesday 8 May, the Department of Defense has briefed that the pier assembly is compete in Ashdod, and the pier will shortly be towed to its intended location off Gaza (link above).
Imagery of 9 May 2024 shows the grouping – vessels and pier – off the coast near Ashkelon.
And here is the reported Sagamore position on 9 May:
As is evident, the positions of Sagamore (reported) and the pier and its support vessels (observed) on 9 May are (a) off the Israeli coast in the vicinity of Ashdod/Ashkelon, and (b) fairly close.
It looks like the pier support vessels are avoiding use of electronics with their known identifiers at this point. Unpaid access at the maritime tracking websites isn’t yielding their updated information. They do appear to be present in the area off Ashdod and Ashkelon, and dedicated trackers on social media seem confident of which ships they are. Since they’re U.S. ships trying to bring off a complex endeavor while being chased around by Hamas mortar fire, I won’t speculate further on their exact location. Suffice it to say, their reporting-shyness looks like it’s about the local threat rather than having anything to do with the weather. The out-of-phase AIS report from Sagamore, reflecting a speed of 41.7 knots, is likewise best assumed to be a tactical security measure.
As indicated in the tweet further above, the first aid delivery will apparently be made by transferring cargo to M/V Roy P. Benavidez, and from the ship – using Army and Navy watercraft (basically, repurposed landing craft) – to the floating Trident pier and thence to the jetty and the waiting shore infrastructure. (If this sounds absurdly complicated, it is.)
Based on recent known ship locations, we could make a narrative involving the cargo delivery passing from Sagamore to Benavidez up near Ashkelon/Ashdod, and then being carried down to Gaza in company with the landing craft that would then maneuver it to the new jetty. It’s also possible, though I wouldn’t count on it at this point, that the support vessels will head down the coast first, and then be joined by Sagamore, there to effect the at-sea transfer of cargo from Sagamore to Benavidez.
There’s also a chance that someone will just use his brain and offload the cargo from Sagamore in Ashdod, taking it overland to Gaza. That may not be the seaborne delivery envisioned, but it would actually make sense. I note that none of these options involves actually using the Trident pier.
Meanwhile, yet a third instance of mortar fire attacking the “pier” was reported on 8 May.
I suspect, once again, that the targeted element of the project was the shore infrastructure. That said, however, installing the offshore components as close as they’ll have to be to the shoreline will put them perilously within range of Hamas weapons, and it’s not clear why that would be done before it’s necessary (or, indeed, be done at all, if fire from Hamas remains a concern).
Readers may also remember that the pier system requires a second major component. The Army portion is the one that’s been under assembly off Gaza. The Navy portion of the system still awaits the arrival of parts that ended up going back to the U.S. East coast in April, when USNS 2nd Lt John P Bobo experienced an engine room casualty. So the complete system isn’t near ready for use yet. Another MSC ship, USNS GySgt Fred W Stockham, has now departed to bring the materiel.
Stockham left Jacksonville, Florida on 7 May, and on 9 May was about 500 NM east of Jacksonville heading east-northeast.
I continue to assess the pier project to be a method of planting a U.S. “flag” in proximity to Gaza. All kinds of political hay could be made from a situation in which Hamas (or PIJ) succeeded in hitting components of the pier system, and Israel – responsible for the security of the undertaking – could be blamed for it. There is also, of course, as previously mentioned, the certainty that contractors for the shore operations, with their special ops and intelligence backgrounds, will function as spies for the outside actors with a political stake in the pier.
A final note on the Gaza situation, and posting commentary on it. It seems hardly worthwhile much of the time to try to write very much. The old-consensus narrative that sees Biden as a garden-variety, lukewarm pro-Israel Democrat navigating the shoals of “the vote in Michigan” is so evidently outdated and non-explanatory, there’s no point addressing it.
Recognizing that Biden is doing nothing that actually supports Israel’s policy or interests isn’t much of an insight either, though. So many people have now come around to seeing that clearly.
As the latest update, that’s partly because of developments like this one.
But part of the problem is also that it’s clear, as with Ukraine, that we aren’t being given an accurate picture of developments in Gaza. Just looking at the Rafah operation, for example, the U.S. East coast media are sweating hard to make it seem as if the Biden administration and the supposed Hamas ceasefire agreement are the center of this week’s events. But they just as clearly aren’t. The central event this week is Israel’s move on Rafah, which Israel can actually prosecute without reference to the Hamas-ceasefire “information-op” gambit – no matter how much the latter is talked up in U.S. media.
To magnify the Hamas-ceasefire narrative, U.S. media have been minimizing Israel’s move on Rafah. I know some skeptics will worry that the Netanyahu government won’t follow through on the move.
But in warfighting terms, the shofar has already sounded, and the IDF is way out on an operational limb if it seriously doesn’t intend to capitalize on what it’s doing to secure the Rafah crossing and prepare to reduce Rafah. Israel has nothing to gain from letting Rafah stagnate – nothing except letting Hamas stay around, dig in, and adapt; letting the U.S. win an extortion game with arms shipments; letting the pier of piers make its ultimate debut off Gaza; and letting the Biden administration take over Israeli policy and hand Jerusalem a “two-state solution” complete with a third-party party peacekeeping force.
Feature image: IDF soldiers pray before going into battle in Rafah, May 2024. Video on Twitter/X, @OliLondonTV.
The Optimistic Conservative 
The perfect insiders plot is underway ; Intelligence corps willfully neglected all the numerous signals of preparations for attacks for at least 2 years , Ground forces firepower was carefully lowered by the last five chief of staff ( less tanks -less artillery – less ammunition ) over a 15 years period , sedition and rebellion from orders were clear in 2010 and were unpunished when instructions from Barak+Netanyahu to prepare action on Iran’s nuclear plants were flatly rejected by Chief of Staff ( Gabi Ashkenazi) + Mossad ( Meir Dagan ) .This rebellion culminated in the Sarbanut ( refusal to serve by Air Force pilots) in summer 2023. Now with 3-4 months of ammunition left , the whole Gaza operation will stop ( failure of Netanyahu) meaning Hamas political victory , then Biden will ask Gantz to withdraw from current government. Meanwhile Hamas and PLO will unite to claim united government of the ” State of Palestine ” recognized by EU . Violent clashes all over the disputed territories with UN security council vote to protect arab civilians meaning UN sending troops to separate ” State of Palestine ” from Israel’s threats of actions. Far right factions will leave government. A complete fiasco.
At the very least, the withholding of Congressional approved military aid makes the US look like a less reliable ally abroad. And essentially flipping of Congress, a coequal branch, weakens us at home. Which is a win for the Obama cabal running China Joe*