CYPRUS PHASE II

Before describing Phase II, I want to take a moment to talk about counting pallets. Counting pallets is an art, not a science. It may seem like a simple thing to count pallets. I can assure you it is not. It is one of the hardest things in this life. This was certainly made more difficult due to the fact that we were building a digital tool as we were using it, but at some point you still need to physically count pallets and it seems impossible. Many late nights were spent walking across pallets in warehouses and on ships, taking one step, counting, another step, counting. Somehow two people doing this will NEVER arrive at the same number. MARCH/APRIL 2024

Roughly two weeks later, the Jennifer set sail—but getting there was its own ordeal. Phase Two required loading all the pallets onto the ship, offloading them, and then loading them again. This was driven by protocol. Every pallet had to be scanned by the IDF using large X-ray scanners—trucks driving through massive scanning units. There’s a whole story here about Italian scanners versus U.S. scanners, but that’s for another time.

Once scanned, pallets were stored in a customs-controlled warehouse—functionally just a locked warehouse sealed at the end of the day. Pallets could not be moved again unless an IDF representative was present to break the seal and oversee the transfer onto the Jennifer.

The Jennifer itself had two cargo bays. Each bay had a ceiling that opened and closed, along with manholes for access, all of which were lockable. Once loading stopped for the day, a small ceremony followed every time: a representative from customs, one from the UN, one from the IDF, and myself would stand there while the crew locked the cargo bays. Customs would apply a seal, and all of us would photograph it being sealed.

The “seal,” to be clear, was not much of a seal—more a piece of thread designed to break if someone entered. And one night, someone did. A drunken sailor on the Jennifer decided—for reasons unknown—to go into a cargo hold. He broke the seal. That meant everything had to come off, be rescanned, and be reloaded.

Aside from the drunken sailor incident, Phase Two mostly went smoothly. Until it didn’t.

They launched on March 30. The Open Arms and the Jennifer sailed together. The Open Arms was fully loaded for its first delivery, after which it was meant to return to the Jennifer, anchored just outside the IDF maritime barricade, restock at sea, and continue running back and forth.

But on April 1, after the barge was offloaded successfully for the second time, our team on the Gaza side was heading back to their safe house when they were targeted by direct drone strikes from the IDF. All seven of them were killed. And in contrast to the moment when the Open Arms returned from it's first trip back to the Larnaca port, when they returned this time, it was tragedy.

It is a strange thing when something is personal, professional, and global all at once. These people were my friends and colleagues, and the world knew what had happened. We shut down the operation, placed all the food we had purchased into storage, attended services around the world, and went home to recalibrate.