Why is Cyprus Still Holding on to the Failed “Humanitarian Corridor” to Gaza?
Proposed in late 2023, the “Amalthia” corridor to bring aid into Gaza has been a failure. It is criticized by both Palestinians and humanitarian organizations as a political distraction from Israel’s campaign of genocide. Yet the Cypriot government insists that the project has not been shelved. Together with its practice of migrant pushbacks, the project reveals how humanitarian, geopolitical, and servicing narratives are intertwined in the management of mobilities in the Eastern Mediterranean, raising critical concerns about the actual purpose and intended beneficiaries of such initiatives.
As Israel’s aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip was intensifying in late November 2023, Republic of Cyprus (RoC) president, Nicos Christodoulides proposed what seemed like a bold move: the creation of a sea corridor carrying humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave, following Israel’s intensifying blockade. The proposal quickly garnered the support of the EU, the United States, Gulf countries, and most importantly, Israel, which, according to reports, had in fact proposed the project to the Cypriot government. The most concerned party, however, was not convinced. As the diplomatic maneuvering over the corridor intensified, Palestinian officials voiced their concern that Israel would be instrumentalizing the corridor for potentially expelling residents of the Gaza Strip.
An Expensive Fiasco
As the danger of famine loomed over Gaza in early 2024, preparations for “Amalthia,” the name given to the corridor by the Cyprus government, intensified. On the 12th of March, a ship provided by the Spanish humanitarian NGO Proactiva Open Arms left the port of Larnaca with aid organized by the US-based charity World Central Kitchen (WCK). The aid was being inspected in Cyprus by US and Israeli authorities. The boat was also towing a barge to deliver the aid, as Gaza has no functioning harbor. However, the WCK initiative soon merged with a US military plan to construct a floating pier in Gaza, from which aid loaded in Cyprus would be delivered on trucks.
From the beginning, a series of issues plagued the corridor, ranging from adverse weather conditions to the killing of seven WCK workers in April 2024. On July 17th, the US officially announced the dismantling of the pier, which had only been operational for a total of 25 days. Palestinians and aid organizations denounced the project as an expensive stunt, designed to deflect attention from increasing evidence of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.
However, despite these failures, the Cyprus government presented Amalthia as a success. In his speech during the United Nations General Assembly, President Christodoulides described Amalthia as a “lifeline of hope and humanity.” Commentaries in the Greek Cypriot press, on the other hand, were more explicit, hailing Amalthia as a diplomatic success that elevates the geopolitical standing of the RoC in the region.
A Long History of Servicing
By offering a sea route, Cyprus arguably provided a service, deflecting attention from Israel’s closure of land crossings to Gaza, while providing the EU, the US, and other countries with an alibi for not exercising diplomatic pressure on Israel to allow humanitarian aid in.
However, offering Cyprus’s strategic location as a mobility hub in the region for political purposes must be placed in a historical context. Since the late 1970s, the policymakers in the Republic of Cyprus have sought to make the island a hub for offshore services and affluent expats. Cyprus’s economy has historically profited from crises in the region, most notably the Lebanese Civil War, which saw middle-class Lebanese and banking capital relocating to the island. Between 2007 and 2020, Cyprus went as far as to effectively sell Cypriot EU citizenship to wealthy foreigners investing in real estate (Rakopoulos, 2023). This was in turn framed as a response to the financial crisis some year earlier, partly caused by an unstable banking sector bloated by offshore deposits.
By creating a financialized service economy dependent on mobility, Cyprus sought to balance the military superiority of Turkey, whose 1974 invasion split the island along ethnic lines. RoC policymakers proudly refer to their island as a “life raft in a turbulent region,” providing facilities for the evacuation of foreign nationals during crises in neighboring Lebanon in 1975, 1982, 2006, and 2024. In July 2024, Cyprus announced the construction of a new EU naval hub for delivering humanitarian aid to the region. “Humanitarian assistance” thus becomes another “service” provided in the context of a borderland economy between Europe and the Middle East, where the returns are often not economic but geopolitical, in this case, a Western perception of Cyprus as a dependable ally.
Necropolitics in the Eastern Mediterranean
The benign nature of these humanitarian initiatives is belied by the pushbacks of migrant boats from Lebanon, and now Syria, by the Republic of Cyprus. Reaching a peak in 2024, the practice has been condemned as violating the principle of non-refoulement by the European Court of Human Rights, while other migrants have drowned due to late responses by Cypriot authorities to distress signals. Constructed as a “crisis,” the 2024 boat arrivals, however, provided Cyprus with an opportunity to negotiate an EU border externalization agreement with Lebanon, once again “elevating the Republic’s standing.”
Both Amalthia and migrant pushbacks make extensive use of humanitarian arguments – easing the human suffering of Gaza and “combating smugglers” respectively – to govern the mobility of bodies and life-providing materialities, in this case, aid. This is not only revealing the imbrication of humanitarianism with border violence (Pallister-Wilkins 2022), but also with geopolitics, as aid and migration governance are increasingly weaponized for foreign policy objectives. The threads connecting both policies are furthermore made visible by the common use of EU- and US-funded infrastructures in Cyprus, where the boundaries between search and rescue duties, migrant deterrence, and aid delivery become blurred.
The island thus finds itself at the center of a mobility regime in the Eastern Mediterranean, characterized by necropolitics. According to Achille Mbembe (2003), the latter describes the social and political power dictating who gets to live and who gets to die. In the case of Cyprus’s mobility policies, this power is articulated in the depoliticized vernacular of humanitarianism, to both save and let die. While migrant mobilities are being pushed back, Israelis on yachts fleeing to Cyprus from Iranian missiles, for example, are welcomed.
As the most proximate EU member and as a country with close ties to the region, Cyprus could contribute to ending the famine in Gaza by lobbying EU bodies to apply political pressure on Israel to allow aid in. Doing so not only requires the disentanglement of humanitarian aid from geopolitical interests, but also breaking with a failed economic model premised on the unequal treatment of different mobilities.
Leandros Fischer is a Lecturer at the American University of Beirut – Mediterraneo in Paphos, Cyprus, and an associated researcher of the nccr – on the move. His research focuses on the fields of critical migration and critical citizenship studies, social anthropology, and social movements.
References:
–Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.
–Pallister-Wilkins, P. (2022). Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives. London: Verso.
–Rakopoulos, T. (2023). Passport Island. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
