The Pentagon
announced on 17 July that the floating pier built off the coast of Gaza would
be dismantled for good, declaring its “mission complete” two months after it
started operations.
“The maritime
surge mission involving the pier is complete. So there's no more need to use
the pier,” Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of US Central
Command (CENTCOM), told a news briefing late Wednesday.
“Our assessment
is that the temporary pier has achieved its intended effect to surge a very
high volume of aid into Gaza and ensure that aid reaches the civilians in Gaza
in a quick manner,” Cooper said, adding that nearly 20 million pounds of aid
entered Gaza via the pier – the equivalent of about 600 truckloads.
For months, the
UN and other human rights organizations have established that a minimum of 500
to 600 truckloads of aid need to enter Gaza daily to alleviate critical famine
conditions. A large part of the aid that reached Gaza via the pier rotted under
the sun for weeks after the US and Israel used the alleged humanitarian
corridor to launch a bloody rescue operation in Nuseirat camp that killed
nearly 300 Palestinians.
Cooper also
announced that efforts to deliver aid to Gaza by sea would shift to the Israeli
port of Ashdod. He added that, after US troops failed to re-attach the pier
last week for a final time, about five million pounds of aid stranded in Cyprus
and at sea will be heading to Ashdod.
“Having now
delivered the largest volume of humanitarian assistance ever into the Middle
East, we’re now mission complete and transitioning to a new phase,” Cooper
claimed. “In the coming weeks, we expect that millions of pounds of aid will
enter into Gaza via this new pathway.”
Earlier this
week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that the floating pier
would be replaced with a “dedicated facility” called Pier 28 in Ashdod Port
without specifying a timeline.
He also claimed
that the facilities will include a field hospital to “treat Palestinian
children.” “This is a significant short-term solution that will address
immediate humanitarian needs until a permanent mechanism is established to
evacuate and treat ill children,” Gallant’s office said.
US President Joe
Biden, who announced the construction of the $230 million structure in March,
expressed disappointment in the pier's ultimate failure, saying, “I was hopeful
that would be more successful.”
After its launch
in mid-May, the pier operated for fewer than 25 days, and aid agencies used it
only about half that time due to security concerns, as the Israeli army has
continuously targeted aid convoys and humanitarian groups operating in Gaza.
Barely any
humanitarian aid has entered Gaza since the start of May when Israel violently
took control of the Rafah crossing after Hamas accepted the terms of a
US-backed ceasefire agreement. Tel Aviv is also in control of another six land
crossings into the besieged enclave, which could allow for the delivery of
necessary assistance that has been rotting on the Egyptian side of the border.
Tali
Shapiro
In
May this year, as part of its psychological torture campaign on the
Palestinians of Gaza, Israel’s army rained down yet another batch of leaflets
on the besieged population of Gaza. The leaflets stood out for many reasons,
but most of all for the extortion website associated with them.
The
Zionism Observer collective, made up of software developers, cartographers,
translators, and archivists, traced the website’s registrar to NameCheap and
the hosting service to Webflow. They immediately lodged a complaint with both
companies.
Webflow
removed the IDF’s extortion website within 24 hours.
“All
of a sudden, in response to my thread, dozens of people were asking Webflow
about this obviously immoral and likely illegal website,” says a member of the
collective. “A lot of software developers — a community very important to tech
companies like Webflow — got involved. People started tagging the CEO. I think
people even started writing to the investors as well. Then poof! It vanished.
404 Not Found.”
This
would be the first time the IDF extortion website had been taken down, and no
hacking was necessary—just old-fashioned public pressure, magnified through
social media.
Webflow
followed up with an email to inquirers suggesting (without stating) that it
never hosted the website.
‘Competent
people’ in the Israeli tech scene ‘left for San Francisco or New York a long
time ago‘
The
collective recently began a mapping effort, looking in detail at a second IDF
website. Again, they found that it was not competently built.
The
extortion website was built using consumer-level tools called “no-code”
designed to help people who are not software professionals. According to the
Zionism Observer’s software developer, the second website containing the
“evacuation” (or, more accurately, forced displacement) map was exceptionally
badly built. This second website left secret data publicly available.
“We
recently attempted to reverse-engineer the IDF’s forced displacement map from
the IDF’s Arabic language ‘Iron Swords’ mini-site,” a member told me. “This
doesn’t involve any sort of hacking or specialized tools. We literally just
looked at the source code delivered to any web browser on every single page
request.”
Data
leaks and embarrassing errors abound. While parsing the data they retrieved,
Zionism Observer’s software developers discovered that Israel’s army
accidentally, through “very sloppy coding,” leaked a table from its
intelligence database.
“At
the start of this work, in December, we thought the IDF was high-tech
competent. They accidentally delivered this data to every visitor on the map’s
page. Both the English and Arabic versions! We’re starting to suspect the
competent people in the Israeli ‘tech scene’ left for San Francisco or New York
a long time ago.”
Second
takedown and partial resurrection
Screenshot
of an email from GoDaddy responding to complaints about a website run by the
Israeli Defense Forces that threatens civilians in Gaza.Screenshot of an email
from GoDaddy responding to complaints about a website run by the Israeli
Defense Forces that threatens civilians in Gaza.
Nine
days after the initial complaint, Namecheap removed the extortion website
without contacting the complainants. The IDF quickly found a new host with
GoDaddy, but the site had significant changes. The child victims and ominous
countdown timer were gone, its search function only partly functioning, and it
never followed through with the threatened release of personal information.
“We,
of course, have no idea why the IDF moderated the website and backed down from
their threats,” said a Zionism Observer member, “but we strongly suspect it was
the result of our public pressure campaign, the multiple de-platforms, and the
IDF’s sudden realization that impunity doesn’t apply everywhere.”
The
collective restarted the campaign, but GoDaddy was quick to resort to
legalistic obfuscations.
“GoDaddy
seems to have made a decision, at what we suspect is a higher level of
management than normally would apply to questions about an abusive website on
shared hosting, that they will not take down the website,” the collective said
but keeps an easy-to-use call to action on the campaign website, encouraging
people to make a complaint to GoDaddy’s abuse department.
Cartographic
resistance
Once
they reverse-engineered the army’s abusive evacuation map website, the
collective cartographers were surprised at the messy data. They spent over a
day cleaning up the geospatial data. According to a cartographer in the
collective, the IDF “should learn more about topology.”
The
collective recently recruited two cartographers and began building an
interactive mapping application. The website gazamaps.com is little more than a
placeholder now, but the collective expects a meaningful launch in a matter of
weeks. The vision is that visitors will be able to click on an area on the map
and see the genocidal TikTok videos posted by soldiers that the team collected,
the relevant evacuation orders, and more.
Zionism
Observer’s maps are just one of its many projects, and the collective is part
of a group of software developers building Palestine-solidarity software. When
it comes to web applications, solidarity with the Palestinian people might just
— for the first time ever — have a tech advantage over the famed “Startup
Nation.”
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