Three U.S. service members have suffered non-combat related injuries in the U.S. pier mission off the coast of the Gaza Strip, the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command said Thursday.
The troops were injured at sea, Vice Adm. Bradley Cooper said. One service member rolled their ankle, while another sustained a back injury, he said. A third service member was injured enough to require medical evacuation to an Israeli hospital, but Cooper declined to elaborate on the nature of that injury.
“From a privacy perspective, I would just leave it at we had two minor injuries and one, as I mentioned, was medivac,” Cooper told reporters.
Cooper said two of the injuries were “minor” and “routine,” and that those service members are back to work on the mission.
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The Pentagon did not immediately confirm when the injuries took place.
He also said there have been no attacks on the pier mission, but that U.S. forces remain “clear-eyed” about threats to service member safety.
Cooper also declined to say which service branch the three injured troops came from.
The Gaza pier mission uses an obscure military capability called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, that generally involves sailors and soldiers.
The plan, announced by President Biden in his State of the Union address, has been touted as another way to get food to Gazans caught between the Israeli military and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
It involves no U.S. troops on the ground in Gaza, according to the Pentagon.
JLOTS involves building a sprawling staging area in the middle of the sea, and then constructing a floating pier that can be stabbed into a beach, allowing trucks or tanks to roll off after ships bring them from the staging area to the pier.
In the Gaza mission, troops stabbed the pier into the beach late last week, but the flow of aid was interrupted over the weekend after aid trucks that had left the beach were overran, resulting in the death of at least one individual, The Associated Press reported.
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More than 1.1 million people are at risk of experiencing “catastrophic food insecurity,” according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.
Since the pier has been stabbed into the beach, 1.2 million pounds of aid has been sent into Gaza, Daniel Dieckhaus, director for USAID’s aid response in Gaza, said.
Zamone “Z” Perez is a reporter at Military Times. He previously worked at Foreign Policy and Ufahamu Africa. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he researched international ethics and atrocity prevention in his thesis. He can be found on Twitter @zamoneperez.
