Biden will announce plans for a temporary aid port on Gaza's coast as cease-fire talks stall

President Joe Biden will announce Thursday that he is directing the U.S. military to help set up a temporary port off the Gaza coast, opening a sea route for food and other aid for desperate Palestinian civilians trapped in the Israel-Hamas war, senior U.S. administration officials said.The announcement signals further deepening U.S. involvement in the war and the escalating conflicts and tensions in the region.

President Joe Biden will announce Thursday that he is directing the U.S. military to help set up a temporary port off the Gaza coast, opening a sea route for food and other aid for desperate Palestinian civilians trapped in the Israel-Hamas war, senior U.S. administration officials said.

The announcement signals further deepening U.S. involvement in the war and the escalating conflicts and tensions in the region. The move also shows the Biden administration resorting to a highly unusual workaround to deliver aid to Gaza's 2.3 million civilians, in the face of restrictions that U.S. ally Israel has placed on overland aid deliveries. Meanwhile, hopes for reaching a cease-fire before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts in the coming days, appeared to have stalled. Hamas said Thursday its delegation had left Cairo, where talks were being held. The outline for the cease-fire would have including a wide infusion of aid into Gaza.

A widening humanitarian crisis across Gaza during five months of war and tight Israeli control of land borders has forced many people to scramble for food to survive and begun leading to deaths from malnutrition. In a meeting on the aid delivery crisis with Israel's ambassador Michael Herzog, the U.S. international development director, Samantha Power, warned that blockaded Gaza “faced a real risk of famine,'' her office said Thursday.

The situation is most dire in the north. Nany of the estimated 300,000 people still living there have been reduced to eating animal fodder to survive. The U.N. says one in six children younger than 2 in the north now suffers from acute malnutrition.

The U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview Biden's announcement before his State of the Union speech, said the planned operation will not require American troops on the ground to build the pier that is intended to allow more shipments of food, medicine and other essential items from a port in the Mediterranean island country of Cyprus. They gave few other details, including how many U.S. troops would take part.

One of the U.S. officials noted that the U.S. military has “unique capabilities” and can do things from “just offshore.” They said it would likely take weeks before the pier was operational.

One of the options under consideration is for the military to provide a floating pier called a JLOTS, or Joint Logistics-Over-the-Shore, another U.S. official said on the condition of anonymity to discuss the options before a decision has been made. The large floating pier allows supplies to be delivered without having a fixed port in place, alleviating the need to have troops on a dock on shore. Ships can sail to the pier, which is secured by anchors, and dock there. Aid moving into the pier would likely be by commercial ship or contracted vessel, the official said.

Defense Department spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement Thursday that U.S. officials and international partners were looking at options, including using commercial companies and contractors.

Officials from the U.S., Europe, Israel and the Middle East have already been deep in discussions and preparations on the possibility of opening a maritime sea route for months. Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in November offered use of his country's port in Larnaca for aid deliveries to the Palestinian enclave, a 230-mile (370-kilometer) journey from Cyprus.

European Union Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen planned to visit Larnaca on Friday to inspect installations. Cyprus early on invited authorities from Israel, the U.S. and other European countries to join Cypriot agents in vetting all shipments so nothing could be used by Hamas against Israel. Aid groups have said their efforts to deliver desperately needed supplies to Gaza have been badly hampered because of the difficulty of coordinating with the Israeli military, the ongoing hostilities and the breakdown of public order. It is even more difficult to get aid to the isolated north.

While land routes could be the most efficient way to get aid into Gaza, one of the senior administration officials said, Biden has directed that “we not wait for the Israelis” to get more humanitarian help in, more quickly.

Officials of the United Arab Emirates said Thursday they were working with partners, including chef and humanitarian Jose Andres and his World Central Kitchen, on the sea route, and finishing details and timing.

The Biden administration's latest move provides one more layer to the extraordinary dynamic that's emerged as the United States has had to go around Israel, its main Mideast ally, and find ways to get aid into Gaza, including through airdrops that started last week.

Biden has been a vital partner to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's military offensive following Hamas's Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. That includes providing vital arms to Israel and fending off efforts to censure Israel for the soaring deaths among Gaza civilians. But administration officials have grown increasingly frustrated at Netanyahu for seeming to shrug off much of the U.S. pressure for Israel to do more to reduce civilian deaths and to allow in humanitarian aid.

''This is an expensive, inefficient workaround to a problem that has other ready solutions,'' Brian Finucane, a former State Department official now with the International Crisis Group, said of the U.S. announcement on a temporary port and wartime sea route.

“It's another symptom of the pathology of the overall approach to the war in Gaza ... which is that the Biden administration is unwilling to use U.S. leverage either unilaterally or multilaterally'' to try to influence conduct of the war by Netanyahu, Finucane said.

Pressure on the Biden administration surged last week after Gaza health officials reported more than 100 people killed at an attempted aid delivery to the isolated north. Israel said its forces fired warning shots when the crowd began moving toward them. Witnesses and medical workers told The Associated Press that most of those injured were shot when Israeli forces fired into the crowds of hungry people.