A humanitarian chef of the World Central Kitchen has fed crisis zones for years

The World Central Kitchen of the Gaza Strip: “It is Time for a Stop, Stop Using Food as a Weapon,” said Andrés Andrés

The founder of the World Central Kitchen said Monday that several of his international volunteers had been killed in the Gaza Strip.

The military said in a statement that it is looking into the circumstances of the incident at the highest level.

The renowned Spanish-born chef said that he lost several of his siblings in an Israeli air strike in Gaza. I am sad and upset for all the people who are in our family.

The aid group World Central Kitchen said Tuesday that it is pausing its efforts to feed Palestinians in Gaza after seven of its workers were killed by an Israeli strike.

The Associated Press said that footage from the Al-Aqsa Hospital show at least four bodies and one is wearing a T-shirt displaying the World Council of Churches logo. The passports of one of the dead indicated they were Britons, Australians, and Poles, according to hospital staff. There is no clear Nationality of the fourth. There were unconfirmed reports that a Palestinian driver from the Gaza Strip was also killed.

The loss of colleagues and the Israeli policy in the isolated coastal enclave were mourned by Andrés and he denounced the Israeli policy in Gaza, which took hundreds of hostages into the territory, killing more than 1,200 people.

“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. Peace starts with our shared humanity. 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. It was the group’s second delivery by sea. A floating dock is to be built by the US off the coast to allow for aid deliveries, but it is not expected to be ready for several more weeks.

World Central Kitchen, led by a humanitarian chef, has fed crisis zones for years, according to José Andrés, the president of Israel, in connection with the Israeli strike

WCK said the seven workers killed in the Israeli strike included a Palestinian and citizens of Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom and Canada — with one a dual citizen of the U.S.

It admitted that more could have been done to detect “bad actors” in its internal operations, as well as implementing additional safeguards to combat fraud, like an anonymous tip line.

More than 20 million meals were given to people in the wake of the dual earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. 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.

“As a cook, as a chef, when I founded this organization, I never expected that this will happen,” he said. “And I almost wanted to pull World Central Kitchen immediately out of Ukraine. But the locals told me: ‘José, You cannot leave. We need you. We need your organization.

According to a new report, in December of last year, Andrés looked the other way on matters of staff safety, including demanding that a food truck be sent to parts of Turkey that were declared “no gos” due to mudslides.

“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.”

Andrés was awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama and has twice been named one of TIME’s most influential people, among them. There were a few democrats that nominated WCK and Andrés for the peace prize this year.

Source: World Central Kitchen, led by a humanitarian chef, has fed crisis zones for years

Global Impact Report on World Central Kitchen: A Food Relief Organization in the Aftermath of a Cosmic Instability, and Mission to Haiti

The nonprofit grew quickly since it was founded. The New York Times reports that the amount of donations and grants increased by fourfold in the year after.

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 identified them by their first names.

After the mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, it delivered hot meals and fresh produce to the neighborhood, as well as handing out food to 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 significantly over the years and opened a restaurant in Port-au-Prince several years after the earthquake to help deal with long-term needs in the area.

“What we are very good at is understanding the problem and adapting,” he said. “And so a problem becomes an opportunity … We’re practical. We’re efficient. And we can do it quicker, faster and better than anybody.”

He told NPR that he expected to see more chefs get involved in disaster response, since restaurant people are well suited to managing chaos.

It served over 20,000 meals in the Houston area in the wake of Hurricane Harvey two years ago, and then another 3.7 million in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in the fall of last year, for which it was named a James Beard humanitarian of the year.

He traveled to Haiti after it was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010, cooking for displaced people in camps — an ad hoc relief mission that helped set World Central Kitchen in motion.

World Central Kitchen said in a statement that it was hit while leaving a warehouse where they had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza by sea.

The organization said the convoy had been traveling in a deconflicted zone, in armored cars branded with their logo and after coordinating movements with Israel’s military, which now says it will conduct an investigation of the incident “at the highest levels.” Gore said it was a “targeted attack”, the CEO of World Central Kitchen.

She said that this is an attack against humanitarian groups showing up in dire situations, where food is being used as a weapon of war.

The U.S.-based organization, which was founded by celebrity chef José Andrés and his wife Patricia in 2010, delivers food to people on the front lines of natural and humanitarian disasters around the world.

The Israeli government says more than 1,200 people were killed in an attack by Hamas on Israel in October. 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.

Gore and Andrés said that more and more people are dying of starvation. “We’ve known for months that famine is imminent and the situation is getting worse.”

It has been warned that 30% of Gaza’s population is already facing “catastrophic” levels of hunger, and northern Gaza could see famine anytime between now and May.

Source: World Central Kitchen, led by a humanitarian chef, has fed crisis zones for years

The Israeli strike: a warning for the U.S. and the euclidean and the new era of security in the 21st century

The U.S. and foreign leaders are condemning the Israeli strike and called for an independent investigation.