José Andrés: The Israeli Air Strike Kills Lives on Gaza and Why Israel Needs to Stop Killing Humans in the Gaza Strip
José Andrés, the founder of the World Central Kitchen that feeds people in war and disaster zones, said Monday that his organization has lost “several” of its international volunteers in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military said that it was investigating the report at the highest levels to understand the circumstances of the tragedy.
The renowned Spanish-born chef commented on the death of his family in the air strike in Gaza. I am heartbroken and grieving for the families and friends and our whole WCK family.”
Just days ago, WCK vowed it would keep pushing to get food into Gaza “until there is substantial aid getting in via land.” The future of those plans is up in the air, and it will be making decisions soon.
Footage that The Associated Press said was from the Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza showed at least four bodies, some wearing protective body armor and one wearing a T-shirt with the WCK logo on it. Hospital staff said the passports of the dead indicated one of them was British, another Australian and one Polish. The nationality of the fourth person was not clear. The Palestinian driver was killed in the Gaza Strip.
After the Hamas terrorist group launched a massive attack on Israel that killed over 1,200 people, including hundreds of hostages, Andrés grieves the loss of his coworkers and denounced Israeli policy in the isolated coastal enclave which it invaded last October.
“The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing,” Andrés said on X. “It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon. No more innocent lives lost. Our shared humanity starts the peace process. It needs to start now.”
The WCK had sent three ships from Cyprus which moored offshore on Monday with 400 tons of food for the territory. The group had delivered by sea before. The United States, which has been airdropping aid packages into Gaza, has said it will build a floating dock off the coast to facilitate aid deliveries, although that is not expected to be ready for several more weeks.
World Central Kitchen, Led by a humanitarian chef, fed crisis zones for years, led by José Andrés, a Palestinian and American worker killed during the Israeli strike
A Palestinian and citizens of Australia, Poland, United Kingdom and Canada are among the seven workers who were killed in the Israeli strike.
It acknowledged it could have invested more in its internal operations to discover “bad actors,” and said it was making changes among personnel and partners in both Ukraine and Turkey as a result — as well as implementing additional safeguards to combat fraud, like an anonymous tip line.
More recently, WCK provided more than 20 million meals to people impacted by the dual earthquakes in Turkey and Syria last April. And it has responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine by providing millions of meals to people there, first in hard-hit population centers and neighboring countries, and increasingly in more remote and vulnerable areas.
When he founded the organization, he said he never thought it would happen. I almost pulled the World Central Kitchen out of Ukraine. I was told by the locals thatJosé could not leave. We need you. We need your organization.’”
In December, Bloomberg published a story alleging — among other accusations — that Andrés looked the other way on matters of staff safety, including demanding that staff send a food truck into parts of Turkey that local officials had declared “no-gos” due to landslides.
“Obviously, it’s people that maybe they don’t feel safe doing this job, but then they shouldn’t be in these kind of humanitarian situations,” he added. “But from there to say that José Andrés puts people in danger — I’d never be able to tell anybody to do what I’m not willing to do on my own.”
One year after being awarded the National Humanities medal by Barack Obama,Andrés was named one of TIME’s most influential people. Several Democrats nominated WCK and Andrés for the Peace Prize.
Source: World Central Kitchen, led by a humanitarian chef, has fed crisis zones for years
El Fondo de Refugio y Evolucion y Servicimiento: El Donde acabo a la edad del Palomar: La aproximaci’on
The nonprofit — which operates on non-governmental contributions — has grown exponentially since its founding. It brought in more than $500 million in contributions and grants in 2022, which the New York Times reports was a fourfold increase from the year before.
It said in June that a 60-year-old volunteer named Igor was killed when Russian shelling hit his apartment building in Kharkiv, and that two other volunteers, Sardor and Viktoria, had been killed in a strike in Chuhuiv the previous July. (The group only identified them by their first names.)
The food was delivered after 10 people were killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket in upstate New York and after the Uvalde school shooting in Texas.
It has fed survivors of major wildfires in California and Hawaii, federal workers in D.C. during the 2019 government shutdown and stranded cruise ship passengers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, throughout which it provided food for front line workers and other vulnerable groups in the U.S. as well as Spain, Indonesia and the Dominican Republic.
The organization has grown substantially over the years and expanded its efforts to focus not only on disaster response but resilience training and longer-term community needs, including opening a culinary school in Port-au-Prince several years after the earthquake that started it.
“We are able to adapt and understand the problem,” he said. “So we have an opportunity to fix the problem.” We’re practical. We’re efficient. And we can do it quicker, faster and better than anybody.”
He told NPR he expected to see more chefs getting involved in disaster response because they’re well suited to managing chaos.
In the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in Texas and Puerto Rico, it fed more than 20,000 meals, and Andrés received the James Beard award for humanitarian of the year.
After the earthquake in Haiti, he traveled to the country to cook for people in the camps and set up the World Central Kitchen.
World Central Kitchen stated in a statement that they were hit while leaving a warehouse where they had unloaded over 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza by sea.
The convoy was traveling in a deconflicted zone, in armored cars branding their logo, and after coordinating its movements with Israel’s military, which will conduct an investigation of the incident at the highest levels. Erin Gore, the CEO of World Central Kitchen, called it a “targeted attack.”
This is an attack on the humanitarian organizations who are showing up in dire situations where food is being used as a weapon of war, she said.
Food to people on front lines of natural and humanitarian disasters around the world is what the United States based organization, founded by celebrity chef JoséAndrés and his wife, works to deliver.
The Israeli government said that it had been working on the ground in the region since the attack on Israel. Israeli’s military response in Gaza has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, displaced an estimated 1.7 million and left the territory on the brink of famine.
“More and more people, particularly children, are dying of starvation,” Gore and Andrés said in a joint statement. “We’ve known for months that famine is imminent and the situation is getting worse.”
With food scarce and malnutrition rising, international experts have warned that some 30% of Gaza’s population is already facing “catastrophic” levels of hunger and that northern Gaza could officially see famine anytime between now and May.
Source: World Central Kitchen, led by a humanitarian chef, has fed crisis zones for years
The Israeli Military Strike: Condolences, Sympathys, and Constraints on the Security and Security of the State of the Art
The United States and foreign leaders as well as international organizations are expressing their sympathies and condemnations of the Israeli military strike.