State Dept: Gaza Pier, Operational For Roughly 25 Days, Was 'Successful', Situation Remains 'Dire'

3 months ago

State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel was asked about the Gaza aid pier and the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

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Transcript

00:00Can I just follow up on the PIR?

00:01Can I?

00:02Sure.

00:03I'll come back to you, General.

00:04Then I'll defer to General.

00:05Sure.

00:06But on the PIR.

00:07Yeah.

00:08Did it meet its goals?

00:09I mean, its goals as defined and so on, you believe that it met its goals.

00:12I know you mentioned that it fed 400,000 Palestinians for one month.

00:16That's one-fifth of the population for one month.

00:19But that was exactly the intended goal, that it will feed 400,000 Palestinians for one

00:24month?

00:25That was not a technical goal or a logistics or a inflow or a throughput goal.

00:34What we are talking about, and when the President announced this at the State of the Union,

00:37what we were talking about was an all-of-U.S. government effort to ensure that we were leaving

00:43no stone unturned and that we were looking at the issue of getting more humanitarian

00:49aid into Gaza through every angle.

00:51That includes land crossings.

00:53That includes airdrops.

00:54That included this PIR option as well.

00:58That's what this is about, is us trying to pursue every possible alternative to ensure

01:03that we can get humanitarian aid into Gaza.

01:07And in that effort, this PIR was successful for all the reasons that I laid out.

01:12Now, certainly, as I said to Matt, the humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to be dire.

01:18And we will continue to work with humanitarian partners, with partners in Israel, partners

01:23across the region, to look at what other avenues are at our disposal to get humanitarian aid

01:29into Gaza.

01:30I believe Ashdod Port will continue to play an important role, especially for aid that

01:35is moving through Cyprus.

01:37We'll continue to work closely with our partners in Israel and others in the region

01:41to do everything we can to get more land crossings open.

01:44So this is not at all – not at all to say that the humanitarian picture in Gaza is perfect.

01:53What I mean to say is that this PIR served a purpose.

01:57We believe that purpose was successful in what it was able to accomplish, and we will

02:01continue to work hand-in-hand with partners at USAID, at the Pentagon, in the region,

02:07to make sure that there are other avenues being looked at also.

02:10I defer to Jennifer, then I'll take my turn afterwards.

State Dept: Gaza Pier, Operational For Roughly 25 Days, Was 'Successful', Situation Remains 'Dire'

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