CYPRUS PHASE III

JUNE-AUGUST 2024

I returned to Cyprus. The goal was to move the pallets to Gaza that we had placed in storage in Larnaca and Limassol after the April 1 attack. I thought this would take about two weeks—simply sending the pallets on standard freight to Israel and then into Gaza. I was wrong. I ended up staying in Cyprus for nearly two months.

By the time I returned, the situation had changed. The U.S. Army had begun operating a floating pier in Gaza, working out of the same Cypriot port we had been using. The effort was operating under a new framework called 2720: a United Nations–Cyprus humanitarian corridor intended to funnel aid into Gaza. Any shipments now fell under this umbrella. There were strong incentives to join rather than operate independently, but the system was new and untested.

The Army’s pier was not working as planned. It had been designed for calm water, and the Mediterranean is not calm. Deliveries stalled, product backed up, and large “floating warehouses” sat offshore holding aid that could not be landed. What was meant to be a breakthrough became a bottleneck. In aerial images (below), you can see their pier next to our old jetty.

This left me with a choice. I could manage everything myself, using private freight, but the costs and complexity would fall entirely on me. Or I could join the UN–U.S. Army operation: register our aid in Cyprus, deliver it to the port, and let the Army ferry it across. The problem was clear—their system was not moving product. Ironically, it was a larger, clumsier version of what we had already done successfully.

So I suggested another path. I asked the UN and USAID—who were coordinating for the Army—whether our pallets could be loaded onto their ships but delivered directly to Ashdod in Israel, bypassing the pier. Nobody had tried this yet. It avoided the pier but created a new challenge: customs. We now had to manage both import into Israel and export out of Israel before anything could reach Gaza.

You might assume exceptions would be made in a humanitarian crisis, but bureaucracy still reigned. We needed detailed guidance from the IDF on how to prepare shipments—both physically and on paper—and the instructions we received contradicted each other. At one point, I had to organize a Zoom call simply to get two Israeli generals to agree on which documents were actually required. That call uncovered the missing piece of the process. From it, the UN established the workflow that would be used to move future aid from Cyprus through Israel into Gaza.

In effect, this was the second time we broke new ground. The first was proving that aid could move from Cyprus to Gaza at all. The second was creating the system to route it through Israel. Along the way, we built a digital platform to track 2,500 pallets across a chain that spanned warehouses, ships, ports, trucks, borders, and, finally, recipients inside Gaza.

Weeks later, after countless delays and negotiations, I received photos from inside Gaza. The same pallets we had wrapped and labeled in Cyprus were now stacked on trucks and in warehouses in Gaza. Seeing that was one of the most rewarding moments of my life.

Looking back, my time in Cyprus—across all three phases—will be one of the most memorable experiences I will ever have. For the people we lost. For the successes we had. For the food we ate. For the knowledge I gained in areas I never expected to understand: maritime logistics, humanitarian coordination, United Nations bureaucracy. For the sheer strangeness of being someone whose job is to invent and navigate corridors of aid in the middle of a war.

I still have not fully processed the scale of what we did, or how unusual this work is. In the fullness of my life, those months will stand out as extraordinary.