Prolonged War: American Fogbow's Plan of Floating Pier in Gaza

Since U.S. President Joe Biden announced his intention to establish a maritime pier on the coast of the Gaza Strip to serve as an outlet for transporting international aid to the besieged population there, it has become clear that an international institution will undertake the task of operating the port and collecting funding from countries.

The plan to establish a temporary port, which Joe Biden directed the U.S. military to implement on March 7, 2024, along the Gaza coast, will not be funded by the United States. Instead, its partners and allies have been urged to contribute financially to complete the project and expedite the delivery of large quantities of aid to the shores of Gaza.

Fogbow's Plan

The commercial planning for the floating port will be undertaken by the American company Fogbow, a consultancy firm comprising former officials from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, in addition to former officials from the United Nations.

Fogbow will oversee the delivery of aid in Gaza through the new maritime corridor, playing a key role in securing ships and coordinating with the Israeli government, the United Nations, and sectors of the Gaza population on the ground.

The project will allow for the delivery of approximately 200 containers of aid, equivalent to the cargo of a truck, to Gaza daily. This is less than the load of 500 trucks of aid that were delivered daily to Gaza before the start of the onslaught on October 7, 2023, which left more than 33,000 martyrs and pushed 2.3 million Palestinians there to the brink of famine.

These shipments to the temporary port will include over two million meals, water, temporary shelters, and medicines.

Fogbow Logistics Services is currently engaged in securing the financial cost from countries until the plan comes to fruition, paying little attention at this stage to the complexities of delivering aid within Gaza, as it is not part of its mission and has not yet determined who will manage the distribution of aid to the people of Gaza.

According to three sources who spoke to the British Reuters agency, the expected cost of the commercial maritime project is around $200 million for a period of six months, with one source estimating the cost at around $30 million monthly.

B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, stated in a report dated early January 2024 that all residents of the Gaza Strip are hungry, around 2.2 million people, enduring days and nights without consuming almost any food.

It added that the desperate search for food is incessant but often yields no results, leaving the population hungry, including infants, children, pregnant or breastfeeding women, and the elderly.

Looking at the structure of Fogbow, its prominent officials and founders include Michael Patrick Mulroy, who is also the founder of the Lobo Institute for Security and strategic studies and a former official at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he and other former U.S. military personnel founded Fogbow Security.

According to information about Fogbow, it has operated as a private limited company in England since early June 2010, engaging in management consulting activities apart from financial management.

Previously, Fogbow's Vice President, Mick Mulroy, specialized in maritime operations at the Special Activities Center of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

He ended his career in the public sector as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East.

The mentioned institute includes several retired CIA (such as Douglas London) and Navy (such as Drew Moulton) officers, and Marine Corps officer Sam Mundy, who briefly served as an advisor to the Jones International Group in Riyadh, which trained the Saudi General Staff.

Fogbow is led by Sam Mundy, a former Marine Corps officer who led forces in the Middle East, and Mick Mulroy, a former semi-military officer at the Central Intelligence Agency and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East.

To start its operations, Fogbow enlisted Steven Fox and Robb Fipp, the founding directors of Veracity Worldwide and Brook Jeru.

Fox is a former member of the Operations Directorate of the CIA, serving in Burundi, France, and Algeria.

Fipp, on the other hand, worked for a period at Diligence alongside his work in investment banking.

Jeru, a former member of the U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command, is currently the Managing Director of the British company Veracity, but is not involved in Fogbow's operations.

Fogbow also enlisted Demetries Grimes, a former officer in the U.S. Navy's reconnaissance aircraft squadron, who held various positions in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Through his work at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, he helped coordinate the maritime evacuation of American civilians trapped in Beirut during the Israeli–Lebanese war in 2006. Thus, Grimes is an expert in complex logistics services at the final delivery stage, having worked in this field in the private sector with Amazon Global.

Collecting Funds

The company is visiting capitals around the world to showcase its private project, which aims to establish a port for transporting humanitarian aid from Cyprus to Gaza by sea.

Once the infrastructure for the project is established, the port will be able to accommodate up to three ships per day carrying tons of equipment and food supplies.

If the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip ends, the facility could remain useful for the reconstruction of the sector, as other entry points in Egypt and the occupied territories are subject to political fluctuations.

CNN and BBC partially revealed the project in early March 2024, but the lack of details raised concerns among prominent U.S. congressional members from both parties — Republican and Democratic.

For instance, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ben Cardin called for briefings on the project in mid-March 2024.

Despite the concerns of American lawmakers about funding for the project, named the Blue Beach Plan, the U.S. government has given the green light for its implementation, reassuring many other interested countries.

For the White House, a private sector project of this nature is significant because it provides relief to Gaza without official U.S. involvement.

While Qatar is reportedly ready to contribute $60 million to the project, many other countries are also interested in pledging financial assistance.

According to officials in Europe and the Gulf, the UAE has pledged $230 million, and other Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain have expressed readiness to contribute between $50 million and $100 million.

In addition to Washington and the Gulf states, Fogbow is in talks regarding this matter in France, Britain, Germany, Australia, and Japan.

Governments willing to finance the project will pay funds to an independent non-profit organization currently being established, which will be responsible for supplying Fogbow.

However, Fogbow has alternative plans to raise funds to ensure the continuity of its maritime pier operations.

According to BBC, Fogbow has briefed a group of European and Middle Eastern governments on its long-term plans. Fogbow plans to establish a donor-managed foundation to assist in delivering aid to Gaza.

Since the project cannot be implemented without Israeli approval, Fogbow representatives visited Tel Aviv at the end of March 2024 to carry out the infrastructure and transportation phases under Israeli supervision.

The Israeli military will monitor the project through intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations in Gaza's airspace.

Similarly, the Palestinian contractors providing logistics services on the ground will undergo secret scrutiny by Israeli intelligence.

On the Israeli side, representatives of the Israeli government and the War Government participate in the discussion of the operation.

According to Pentagon spokesman Patrick Ryder, the operation will involve building a floating pier in the sea to allow ships to deliver aid, which will then be transferred onto naval support ships and unloaded onto a floating bridge.

This two-lane bridge, about 1800 feet (0.55 km) long, will lead to the beach — secured by unidentified non-American individuals — and trucks will then arrive at the bridge to collect and transport the aid.

The maritime corridor begins from the island of Cyprus, where aid ships pier and undergo inspection. Then, the aid sets sail to the port and from there to the sector.

The BBC has learned that Fogbow company is considering dredging the beach to allow amphibious landing craft to approach close enough to unload aid onto trucks.

Duties Limited

U.S. Army ships have set sail to transport equipment to the Mediterranean Sea.

According to the Pentagon, the plan involves two main components that need to be assembled: a large floating pier made of steel slabs and a bridge and pier with two lanes stretching 1800 feet (0.55 km).

The bridge will be assembled at sea and "pushed" to the shore, allowing U.S. forces to avoid setting foot in Gaza.

The Guardian reports that, according to U.S. officials, aid shipments will be inspected by Israeli inspectors stationed at the Cypriot port of Larnaca, indicating Israeli control over the flow of aid under the guise of "security scrutiny."

Intelligence Online states that its sources in "Tel Aviv" deny the feasibility of the project, which could completely thwart it.

In this context, The Economist interprets the momentum gained by the port construction plan as stemming from growing despair in Gaza, affirming that building a maritime pier for aid will not address hunger and disease in the enclave.

It's worth mentioning that the effectiveness of the temporary port exceeds that of airdropping aid, but it's much less effective than transporting aid by land.

Even U.S. lawmakers, despite their support for Biden's idea, still insist that the most direct and effective way to deliver aid to Palestinians is through border transport.

According to U.S. officials, building the pier and bridge will take 60 days to complete and will likely require up to 1000 U.S. military personnel.

However, this extended timeline reflects the complex nature of the project, especially in light of increasing frustration in project management over the Israeli government's clear refusal to acknowledge the urgency of the humanitarian crisis, despite mounting pressure from Washington to facilitate aid access to civilians in Gaza.

Since the temporary pier concept was partially developed by Fogbow and since the company will not be involved in aid distribution, the United States is still trying to determine who will be on the other side of the bridge to receive and distribute aid within Gaza.

Two individuals familiar with the plan told the BBC that the Israeli Occupation Forces will oversee external security to prevent crowds of civilians from reaching the beach and to make the area secure, with responsibility for distribution falling on unarmed local Palestinians.

However, 25 non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International, issued a joint statement saying that countries must ensure that the maritime corridor does not legitimize the Israeli protracted military occupation of the territory by exploiting the necessity of aid.

In this regard, Al-Masar Studies said this warning against aid exploitation is attributed to two reasons. Firstly, the construction and operation of the port within about two months implicitly means that the U.S. administration acknowledges that Israeli aggression on Gaza will continue and extend its duration and that Washington will not seek to stop it completely.

For this reason, Israeli researcher Zvi Bar'el wrote an article in the Hebrew magazine Haaretz titled U.S.-built Port Could Turn Israel Into a Gaza Policing Force, indicating that the port might compel Israeli forces to remain in Gaza permanently.

The second reason, according to the mentioned center, is that "the mechanism for delivering aid to Gaza will likely be used to blackmail the Palestinian people and weaken the government of the Gaza Strip and the authority of the Hamas movement in the strip, and this will be done by distributing aid through entities other than the government in Gaza."

According to the same study, "the importance of the aid issue increases if one takes into account its necessity for the Palestinian people suffering from the Israeli blockade, as this file is one of the prominent files in the ongoing [extermination] war, if not the most prominent."