Pier pressure: a visit to Gaza’s aid platform

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

People really love to be predict a crash, but house prices are just going up and up. We look at why the global market is so resilient and what this means for those desperately trying to get a foot on the property ladder.

And there are lots of people who say wrongly that baseball is boring. Well, now they've got options. We head to an exhibition variant of the game that's got acrobatics and comedy and theater and some lessons for the big leagues. First up though.

So here we are in the shore.

We're at the shore already. Oh my goodness.

Yes.

Looking ahead, there it is, the Mediterranean. That is a short trip. This is a part of the Mediterranean. I did not think I would ever go and visit in this way. Who would have imagined? You'll be here, right?

Zanny Minton Beddows is the Economist's editor in chief.

Thank you very much.

We are literally 30 yards, 30 meters from the Mediterranean. Greg, you were last year, a year ago. How different was it to what you see now? Describe what you see now.

I mean, it's, I was thinking on the way in, it's very hard to get your bearings on the way in. I've been here many times. That road that we took, that corridor, I've been through that area. I've passed Salahuddin Road, which we drove over. But none of it's recognizable now from before.

Greg Karlstrom is a Middle east correspondent for the Economist.

Coming in in an armored vehicle and coming past. Just absolute destruction all around. It's, it's strange, it's surreal. That's Rieman up there. Yes, that's the Remal neighborhood with the.

Boulevard with the villas, the penthouse building.

That looks like it was a restaurant once. Now, this is the we're walking across the main sea road. You can imagine here there would have been kids on the beach, cafes. It's a different world now.

This week, journalists from the Economist became the first media to visit what's called the Jlot's Pier, jutting out from the coast of the Gaza Strip. Americans set up the pier in mid May to help deliver aid into Gaza, and it has not been a simple success story. Zanny and Greg have returned to Israel and are joining us to discuss the pier and what they saw. Good morning, both.

Good morning, Jason.

Good morning.

Let's start with this. Why did you both travel into Gaza?

Well, Jason, I'm here in the region for the whole week. I'm working on an episode of the weekend Intelligence that's going to look at what happens the day after the Gazan conflict. What we're trying to do is to get a sense from voices across both societies to see what is likely to happen in the next few weeks, months in Gaza. But to do that, I really thought it was important to get a sense as best I could of what Gaza was like today. The only way that you can get into Gaza right now is with the Israeli Defense Force. And to do that, you are what is called embedded. It's a very restrictive way of doing it, but it's the only way of going in there right now. So I decided that despite the risks and despite the restrictions, it was worth it. And so I went along with Anshul, my colleague from Jerusalem, Greg, and our producer, Heidi Pett, and we clambered into an armored vehicle along with three other Humvees in a convoy and set off through the fence and into Gaza. So we're going in the armored vehicle, but ahead of us there are two Humvees. And what's the one in the middle?

We went across on what the Israelis call the Netzarim Corridor. It's a road that bisects Gaza that the Israeli army has cleared over the past nine months during the war. Then you travel west for six or seven kilometers, not a long distance at all. And at the end of it, you reach the Mediterranean Sea and you reach this temporary pier, which the Pentagon, of course, which has an acronym for everything, calls the jlot, that means Joint Logistics over the Shore. And it's the temporary pier that the Americans have built on the coast of Gaza.

And I've heard about the pier, but I don't know anything about the pier. Describe it. What did you find when you finally saw it?

The American Built pier is a floating structure. It's these slabs of metal that have been put together that are floating on top of the Mediterranean and sticking out into the sea quite a distance and can support the weight of entire lorries that take aid supplies and deliver them to Gaza. So there's a striking contrast between that pier and the makeshift one next to it that was built earlier in the war and constructed out of rubble.

So these are bits of people's houses that were. There were houses here that was. This is prime beach accommodation. They've clearly taken and are using large, large, I don't know, 8 meters by 4 meters, slabs of concrete which were probably the sides of a wall. They are partly bits of them smashed, a bit smaller, are used to create the temporary pier. I feel like I'm looking around, seeing kids building blocks in disarray. So, Jason, this might seem a bit confusing, but picture yourself standing on the beach looking out, and right in front of you, there is the smaller makeshift pier that was constructed out of rubble, the one I've just described. That's the one that was used for World Central Kitchens deliveries, for example, early in the war. And then a little further to the left, as you're looking out into the Mediterranean, is the floating J lot that Greg has just described. And the big thing is it's just a whole different scale. One is small and makeshift, the other is the full might of an American structure.

And yet, for all that full might, that pier has had some serious problems, has it not?

Certainly has.

That would be an understatement. The first problem has just been keeping it afloat. The pier was inaugurated on May 17, so about six weeks ago now, but it very quickly, about a week after it started operations, broke apart and eventually had to be towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod for repairs. That took it out of commission for about three weeks. And so in the six weeks that this pier should have been operational, it's only been working for about two of those weeks. And that's now. That's in the summer when the Mediterranean is relatively calm. It's going to be much more difficult, probably impossible to keep operating the pier as we get closer to winter and closer to the rough weather in the Mediterranean. The second issue has been not just operating the pier itself, but then once aid is delivered via the pier, distributing that aid to people who need it within Gaza. We were in Gaza with Daniel Hagari, the spokesman for the Israeli army, who explained to Zanny how those deliveries are meant to happen.

The JLR pier is a Very complex operation. Let's have a look.

We're walking towards it. Yeah.

The trucks are being offloaded on this pier and then they come out.

So the trucks go onto the pier and I see that the jcb, but.

The truck is coming directly.

I see. It comes to the end.

It comes directly to the end. And it goes here. We will enter the offloading area and it goes back.

I see.

And it goes back and go back outside to the ship and do bags, etc, etc, etc. And what's nice, it's that the part of the ship is the pier is the pier.

I see. And it just roll. It's like a roll on, roll off ferry.

Yeah, exactly.

So while you were there taking all this in, did you actually see any aid arrive?

It was definitely Jason in action when we were watching it. I mean, I saw people walking along the pier in green vis jackets, which I was told were contractors. There's absolutely no American boots on the ground there. Very clearly that was made very, very plain to us. It was, I wouldn't say humming. There weren't a huge number of people, but we saw pallets coming off in.

The little over an hour that we were by the pier, we saw two landing craft come in and unload. And the tempo was pretty fast. These vessels would come dock at the edge of the pier out in the Mediterranean. They would unload their cargo and then one of them left and another vessel maybe a half hour later came and also began unloading supplies. And they had pallets full of food and other supplies going onto flatbed trucks and then moving to this staging area that we saw, which the Israelis have built.

I can see some pallets coming out now. Red and white pallets being moved off the amphibious vessel straight onto the flatbed right of a truck that will take them, will bring them down the 250 meters up the road, right next to where we're standing, into the concrete staging area that we were just in, which is one of three here that together collectively have 7,000 pallets.

The Israeli army says there are 7,000 pallets backed up in the staging area and not going to people in Gaza. We spoke with the World Food Program, which said that figure sounds more or less accurate. They think there are about 6,500 pallets in that staging area. Most of them contain food. And these supplies have just been stuck in some cases for days or for weeks. They're not being delivered to people who need them.

So what's the holdup? Why isn't that aid getting through?

It depends on who you Ask. Both Israel and aid organizations have a different story about that, and arguably they're both right. For the Israelis, the problem is Hamas. Daniel Hagari, the army spokesman, says that Hamas has been targeting the pier and that it's unsafe, therefore, for aid supplies to be delivered elsewhere in Gaza.

They're attacking the pier which was built for humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza. This is one of the. One of the. We know because they've stopped terror attacks that were aimed to the pier, and.

He'S right about that. There have been attacks on the pier, including one Just 48 hours before we visited. So it has become a target before. But there's also. For aid organizations, there's a much bigger security issue and logistical issue in trying to move aid throughout Gaza, whether it's from the staging area by the pier, whether it's from Kerem Shalom, the main land border crossing in the south. Aid organizations say it is a logistical nightmare to move aid around Gaza. We spoke to Matthew Hollingworth from the World Food Program, who explained to us the process of trying to move just a single convoy of aid from a border crossing or a staging area to people who need it in Gaza.

When our teams, when my teams start work every day at 6am they know they will spend eight to 12 hours in the field to do an hour's work that's sitting at checkpoints and sometimes sitting in checkpoints when there there is conflict nearby, not being given a green light to either move ahead or to retreat and leave an area. In June alone, two of the warehouses where materials from jlots are delivered to have been hit by missiles. Deconflicted warehouses, locations known by all parties to the conflict, where our staff are working. In the last two weeks, twice my teams from the World Food Program have come under indirect fire, tank fire within 50 meters of their position, again coordinated in a place where the IDF knew we were in spite of us being present.

We've also been speaking with Palestinians in the occupied west bank and they have their own thoughts on the pier as well.

Yeah, there's a particular mistrust, indeed, I think probably conspiracy theories about the pier among Palestinians. We talked to a number and several of them said this pier has nothing to do with aid delivery. It's actually a cover for U.S. intelligence operations. And the reason that they say that is that the pier is also close to the Nusayrat refugee camp where the recent operation a few weeks ago to rescue hostages took place. And one of the hostages that the Israelis rescued was taken back to Israel in a helicopter that took off from the shore very near the pier. So there is this rife conspiracy theory that this pier has nothing to do with delivering aid and everything to do with helping Israel. That's undoubtedly a conspiracy theory, but it gives you both a sense of the degree of suspicion on both sides, the lack of goodwill. And to me, I guess, the beer has become a bit of a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the distance which America is keeping to this conflict. It's become perhaps a metaphor of the inadequacy of the assistance, and it's also become a metaphor for the conspiracy theories and suspicion of hillsides.

But regardless of your view, it has to be said, it sounds like this pier as a mission has been a failure.

US Central Command says more than 6,000 tons of aid have come in so far since the pier was inaugurated on May 17. And that's an impressive sounding number. But there's another way to think of that number, which is that throughout this war, we've been talking about aid to Gaza. In terms of trucks. How many truckloads of humanitarian aid are coming into Gaza? 6,000 tons of aid coming over the pier. That's the equivalent of between 300 and 400 truckloads. And if you divide that over the two weeks that the pier has been functioning, has been in operation, we're talking about 25 to 30 truckloads a day. That is a small fraction, a tiny fraction of what has been coming through the land border crossings. It's less than 10% of what aid organizations say they need each day to come into Gaza. And it's also a far cry from the 150 trucks a day that the Pentagon said this pier would be delivering when they started building it back in March. So it's not nothing, but it's falling short both of the goals that the US Set for itself and falling far short of what is needed in Gaza. And the UN said yesterday that it would pause all operations in Gaza unless there was better coordination between the Israeli army and aid agencies.

And coming back to the bigger picture, why you're in Gaza to begin with, this question of the day after, how did you leave things? How do you feel about that notion now?

Well, that pier we've been talking about was always meant to be temporary, and it'll be gone by autumn. What I'm in the region to try and understand is what happens after the autumn, what happens in the next months, in the next year. And I have to say, on the basis of what the first four days of this, I'm deeply gloomy. I'm gloomy about the scale of the task at hand, the scale of the security challenge, frankly, the magical realism of many of the solutions that are being touted about international forces and so forth. This is really, really hard. We haven't finished our trip yet. We've got a lot more people to talk to. The podcast that we're working on will come out in a couple of weeks, but it's been a really sobering few days and this is an absolute tragedy. It's 2 million people in just appalling conditions in a place that has been flattened. Scale of destruction that is hard to fathom in the midst of a conflict that I can really see, regardless of whether there'll be a short term ceasefire or not. A deep, deep conflict and deep suspicion, a deeply traumatized Israeli society, hugely traumatized Palestinian society, anger, radicalization, fury on both sides, and frankly, a largely absent international community. Jason, I'm giving you my sense now. I reserve the right to change my mind. The podcast may come out somewhat differently, but I have to say all the voices that we've talked to, and there have been many, have made me feel that this is going to be really, really tough.

Zanny, Greg, thank you both very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jason.

There's a running gag on social media where minuscule apartments in cities around the world are sold or rented for vast amounts of money.

This is officially the smallest apartment in all of New York City, measuring just.

55 square feet or just about 5, 5.1 meters squared.

Welcome to my place.

Cost me about 7, 300 Hong Kong. That's about US$900 ish.

And it's about 150 square foot. We wanted to make sure that when the bed is up, it doesn't feel like you have a bed hanging above your head.

Right. But jokes aside, a lot of people who want to get on the housing ladder are worrying not just about their beds falling off the wall, but rocketing prices. And those who are looking to sell, sell seem to be sitting pretty.

A global house price index shows that in the past year, house prices globally have risen by about 3%.

Callum Williams is a senior economics writer at the Economist.

And then in some places, price growth is even stronger. So in America, prices are rising by about 6 to 7% year on year. In Australia, they're rising pretty strongly, and in Portugal, they're really zooming up.

Put that in a bit of context for us. You say it's unexpected what had been happening before.

So in the past couple of Years it's been a little bit rough in some countries, prices have fallen by quite a long way. And then of course you have pockets of weakness in places, even in the stronger markets. So in the US for example, look at cities like San Francisco, Boise, Idaho, Phoenix. But you know, the thing that's kind of interesting about this is that people were expecting things to be a lot worse. A couple of years ago, central banks across the world started to raise interest rates quite sharply to deal with the surge in inflation. And that's bad news, people thought, for the housing market, because it means that mortgage costs go up. And if you look at the kind of rules of thumb in the academic literature, there are expectations really from that, that nominal house prices, before you adjust for inflation, would fall anywhere from kind of 30 to 50%. But in fact, when you look globally on average, there's been basically no decline at all in global house prices.

So what does all of that mean for buyers and sellers?

The market is showing a lot more resilience than people were expecting. Yes, there are some pockets of weakness, Canada and Sweden for example, but on the whole it's showing quite a lot of resilience. In concrete terms, that means that mortgage borrowers are doing a lot better on average than people had expected. So if you look at the share of American mortgage borrowers that are kind of late on their mortgage payments or who have stopped entirely, that's pretty much at its lowest level ever. We find similar data in Europe. With the possible exception of Germany, there's basically almost zero evidence of severe mortgage distress in response to these higher rates. And so that raises the question of like, well, why is this? One explanation that people often bring up, particularly in the US context, is the fact that so many mortgages are on fixed rates. What that means is that when the Fed raises rates that isn't passed on to mortgage borrowers straight away. And you've kind of seen a bit of a move in other countries towards a more American system in recent years, which means that borrowers are protected. The interesting thing is that that can't be the whole story because you're still getting new people coming into the market who are happy to pay these higher rates, taking out new mortgages and coming into the housing market that way.

I'm interested in how the rise in long term renters comes into this. We ran a piece on the intelligence just recently about generation rent that seems sort of at odds with all this house price buoyancy, resilience and new buyers.

It is true that in lots of countries the home Ownership rate for young people in particular has come a long way down. I think this has long term structural causes behind it. It's not like a short term thing. In particular, what you saw after the 2008 crisis was that mortgage regulators across the rich world became much stricter about who was allowed to get mortgages. And so that had a disproportionately big effect on young people. And so that's one of the main reasons why home ownership for young people has come a long way down. There was this kind of hope in 2022 that interest rates will go up, house prices will come down, and it will become a lot easier for young people to get on the housing ladder. Theoretically, that was always wrong because when house prices come down, that's normally for a reason. House prices would be down, but mortgages would be a lot more expensive. The situation we're in now is that house prices have remained very high. And so there's no places really where we're seeing a meaningful reversal of the long run decline in home ownership among young people.

So if that's the case, then are we just going to see house prices rising and rising because we've got this solid stability and base of people wanting to buy?

I think that seems likely. Probably one of the biggest reasons behind the resiliency in house prices and rent in the past year across the rich world is because of immigration. As that continues, you're going to see more and more new demand for the housing market. I think the other thing to sort of bear in mind is for the first time in a long time, people are now getting meaningful interest payments on their savings. And then very much unlike the crisis in 2008, 2009, labor markets have been pretty strong. And so what that means is the cost of your mortgage has gone up, but the amount of money that's coming in on an annual basis has also gone up. And on average, it's gone up by a lot more.

So normally when we get a rise in house prices, people immediately start talking about housing crashes. But I think you're saying there isn't a danger of a housing crash now.

Yes, of course, there are still places, even in the most buoyant housing markets where things do look weak. But if you're in a situation where incomes of those homeowners are doing actually pretty well, then it's hard to see how there could possibly be any kind of meaningful housing downturn.

And what happens next?

Probably we'll be in a situation in a few months time when the majority of central banks will be cutting interest rates and that will feed into mortgage rates for those on variable rates and those who are coming into the market for the first time. So again, it's kind of hard to see how there's going to be anything really nasty happening in the global housing market market.

Callum, thank you so much.

Thanks, Raisy.

Robert Anthony Cruz off the Batter's Eye.

In dead center at a sports stadium in Fresno, California, a crowd has gathered. They've come to watch baseball, but there are a few notable differences.

This is banana ball.

They've come to see the Savannah Bananas.

Erin Braun is our west coast correspondent.

Aside from their uniforms being bright yellow, they look like any other baseball team. But it's unlikely you'll see their antics in Major League Baseball. This is a team where players perform backflips and here come the acrobatics as he comes across the sky and batters walk on while lip syncing to a famous song. The umpire at one point did a belly dance and parents chased their little kids around the field between innings. It's probably no surprise then that they've built a large audience on TikTok. The Savannah Bananas are basically baseball's version of the Harlem Globetrotters. So they go on tour, they combine acrobatics and theater and comedy and baseball, and it's really popular. It's really hard to get tickets. I failed to win the lottery the first time around. They've got more TikTok followers than major League Baseball does. And I think the league could really learn from the way that the Bananas are trying to garner interest, especially among young people.

But don't all the viewers of regular baseball, Major League Baseball, get all the entertainment they need?

I think that's really the question at the heart of the matter. MLB in recent years has been struggling to kind of get young people especially interested in the game. It's definitely not America's favorite sport anymore. That honor belongs to American football. And the median age of Major League Baseball ticket buyers was 51 in 2019. It's since come down a bit and MLB has made changes like a pitch clock to speed up games. They've really embraced streaming and they're trying to reach younger fans. But the Bananas kind of do this explicitly by reaching people on TikTok, by doing silly things, by trying kind of every minute of the game to engage fans when they're on the field.

So if they're that popular on TikTok, if it's that hard to get a ticket, they're certainly getting the audiences in the young ones. I Suppose, is there anything that Major League Baseball can learn from all this?

I think there is a lot. And it's not necessarily like to copy and paste specific things the Bananas are doing, but the way that the team tries to engage fans I think is really important and the league could learn from it. And I think there's a few rules of banana ball that really embody this idea because there are different rules. It's not your average baseball game. And a couple of my favorites are that each inning is worth just one point. So you could score as many runs as you want, but whoever scores the most runs in that inning just gets one point. And that's meant to keep the games really close the entire time. There's a two hour time limit on matches. And then my favorite rule of all of them is if a fan in the stands catches a foul ball, it counts as an out. And that puts the game kind of in the hands of the crowd.

Dustin Baber with a barrel.

But foul caught by a fan. And that's your ball game.

Of course, Major League Baseball is never going to do that, but I think they could still look at these games and be like, you know, hey, what can we learn from this team? What can we adopt as our own?

But what are the chances of that? This is America's pastime. The die hard fans are going to think this is a different thing. This is a thing for the kids. Don't mess with my sport.

I'm not sure if that's true. They can't obviously adopt the cheesiest, craziest things. We're not gonna see MLB players doing flips in the outfield, right? Except I would love that if it happened. When I was at a Bananas game in Fresno recently, I was really shocked by the kind of ways in which the Bananas do try to pay homage to baseball. And that's like you sing the national anthem and you salute veterans and teachers and police officers and you have that same sense of patriotism and tradition that you get at a baseball game. You just also have things like the umpire twerking in between innings and hot.

Dogs and beer and the seventh inning.

Stretch and all of those things to boot.

That is bananas. Erin, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow. It.