Three U.S. soldiers assigned to the Gaza pier mission were injured Thursday, including one whose injuries were serious enough to require a medical evacuation to Israel, according to the Pentagon.
The injuries mark the first such incidents for U.S. service members in the operation to bring humanitarian assistance to Palestinians via a pier off the coast of Gaza.
Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, informed reporters Thursday that the three service members sustained noncombat-related incidents at sea.
“Three injuries, two were very minor injuries and those individuals returned to duty. One individual is undergoing care at a local Israeli hospital,” Cooper said during a Thursday press call, adding that the two with minor injuries suffered a sprained ankle and a back injury and both had returned to duty.
The third individual was injured on a ship at sea and medically evacuated, Cooper noted.
Defense officials later told USNI News that the most critically hurt soldier had been working on the staging platform off the coast of Gaza at the time of the injury. Reuters reported the individual was in critical condition.
The U.S. military earlier this month completed a pier off the coast of Gaza as part of a maritime corridor to provide aid to the besieged territory. The corridor starts in Cyprus, which receives aid from international humanitarian groups and donor countries that then can be shipped to a U.S.-built floating dock 2 miles off the coast of Gaza.
From there, ships unload the assistance onto trucks that drive onto U.S. Army watercraft and sail to a pier anchored to the beach in Gaza. Humanitarian workers then take the aid for ground-based distribution in Gaza, with no U.S. troops on the land.
In the first week of the pier’s use, the U.S. delivered more than 1.2 million pounds of aid to Palestinians, according to U.S. officials, though it has been stressed that the maritime corridor is not a sufficient substitute for land crossings and will not meet the “staggering needs” in Gaza.
The pier has also had several complications, including delays in attaching it to the coast due to bad weather. And at least one truck has been looted, and a Hamas drone attack miles away from the pier led to the freezing of aid convoy movements.