A private US firm is pushing plans to build a movable jetty off Gaza’s coast.
WASHINGTON - A private US firm run by former military and ex-CIA members is pushing plans to build a movable jetty off Gaza’s coast so more lifesaving goods can get into the besieged Palestinian enclave. But UN officials, aid workers and several European government officials have expressed doubts about the project and voiced scepticism over the group’s origins and motives.
Biden’s comments came hours after the Pentagon announced that the US military was abandoning efforts to reinstall the pier, which was detached last month due to anticipated high seas. Fogbow shipped its first pallets of aid, with the help of the US military, on June 27, according to Mulroy. Some 1,100 tons of flour worth “nearly $1 million” – bought by Fogbow from a Cypriot mill – were shipped from the Larnaca port in Cyprus to Gaza.
“I explained to the woman on the phone that we are also interested in getting aid into Gaza and suggested we might be able to collaborate,” said Julia. That’s the same question that a UN front-line aid worker asked himself when a former member of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs turned up in his office in early February on a charm offensive. Chris Hyslop, a Fogbow official, came armed with a PowerPoint presentation laying out his company’s Blue Beach proposal for a movable pier. He was accompanied by Eric Oehlerich, a former US Navy Seal.
“We sniggered because none of it made any sense,” the UN aid worker continued. “It was so removed from the political reality. It sounded like a crackpot scheme, to be honest.”The Fogbow team told the UN worker they had financial backing from “wealthy individuals” and the government of the United Arab Emirates.
Fox formerly worked for the State Department, specialising in Israeli and Palestinian affairs, among other regions, according to Fogbow’s website. Yet according to Eamon Javers’s “Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy,” a 2011 book about the secret world of corporate espionage, Fox also formerly worked for the CIA.
Fogbow describes itself as a provider of humanitarian aid logistics. “We don't pretend to be a humanitarian organisation,” Hyslop said in the Zoom call with him and Mulroy, saying the firm operates merely as a “transporter”. Other top advisers at Veracity include Richard Dearlove, who was head of the British intelligence agency known as MI6 from 1999 to 2004, including during the US/British invasion of Iraq.Mulroy and Hyslop said that they went to the White House twice, in early 2024, to discuss their Blue Beach project. The meetings were set up by Curtis Ried, Chief of Staff of the US National Security Council and Assistant to Brett McGurk, Senior Advisor to the US President for Middle East Affairs.
US Army Major Harrison Mann described the US jetty as a PR stunt, saying: “The pier and the airdrops look like they were intended to satisfy Americans who were concerned about the suffering of Palestinians, but I’m not sure what segment of the population both deeply cares about the welfare of Palestinians but is not engaged enough to see the failure of both the pier and the airdrop projects,” he told FRANCE 24 and PassBlue.
“For people who know anything about humanitarian assistance, the US pier doesn't make any sense because the whole reason we are doing it is because our ally Israel is blocking humanitarian assistance,” she said, adding that the money used to build the pier could have been better spent. “When DoD is invited to support a response, then they can use the resources they have to speed things up. When it comes to working with a private firm like Fogbow it has to be contracted out by the DoD," the US government source told FRANCE 24 and PassBlue. "Typically, DoD lawyers would say no, unless it was for something specific to their needs like vessel recovery.
“I've never heard any humanitarian ask Maersk or APL or major global shippers if they have former military people on their staff,” Hyslop said on the Zoom call. “Of course they do. All their logisticians primarily come from world militaries and no questions are asked. But they're asked of us. And I understand it.”
The landing zone would bring an “additive route” to overland roads and be “impervious to weather conditions and wave heights”, Mulroy said, describing how the project would work. “It's essentially on the beach and it has sea breaks and all that stuff.” But a Gazan photographer, Mohammed Hajjar, who is based in the enclave, said that Al Masri is regarded with suspicion by the local population, “Most Gazans don’t know him. We don’t know his politics, his goals, what his political programme is. My opinion he is not in a position to be part of any solutions in post-war Gaza.
Israeli media reported in March on Netanyahu’s post-war vision for the Gaza strip, known as “Gaza 2035”. The document, later published online by Netanyahu’s office , promotes the idea that Gaza “can become a significant industrial production centre for the shores of the Mediterranean with … access to… energy and raw materials from the Gulf while leveraging Israeli technology”.
Jamie McGoldrick met with Fogbow three times earlier this year when he was the UN’s humanitarian aid coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, along with David Satterfield, then the US special envoy for the Middle East. McGoldrick said the firm was “not very transparent” about their intentions, including sources of funding – as Fogbow’s name, which means ghost rainbow, might suggest.
McGoldrick said that Fogbow’s operations in the region may be a way for the US to get into the Gaza reconstruction market.
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