The World Central Kitchen aid workers were killed in Gaza
World Central Kitchen, Led by a humanitarian chef, has fed crisis zones for years, according to the 2009 Israeli strike-inspired report by Andrés
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 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.
Over twenty million meals were given 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.
“As a cook and chef, 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.
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. I would never be able to tell people to do what I’m not willing to do on their own, since he puts people in danger.
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. Several democrats nominated WCK and Andrés for the peace prize this year.
The Food Pantry Project: a nonprofit that helps food pantries and disasters in the New York, Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rican coasts
The nonprofit has grown so much since it was started. The New York Times reported that it brought in more than $500,000 million in contributions and grants in 2002, but that it went up fourfold 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.)
It delivered food to a neighborhood in the New York area after 10 people were killed in a shooting at a grocery store, and also provided food to the Uvalde school shooting scene in Texas.
The group has fed survivors of major wildfires in California and Hawaii, federal workers in D.C., as well as other vulnerable groups in the US, throughout the year.
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.
“What we are very good at is understanding the problem and adapting,” he said. The problem becomes an opportunity. We are practical. We’re efficient. We can do it faster and better than anyone else.
He told NPR that chef are good at managing chaos and he expected them to get involved in the disaster response.
It served more than 20,000 meals in the Houston area after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and another 3.7 million across Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, for which Andrés was named the James Beard humanitarian of the year in 2018 (seven years after winning its “outstanding chef” award).
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.
The World Central Kitchen halted its feeding of Palestinians in Gaza, after seven of its workers were killed by an Israeli strike.
The World Central Kitchen charity said in a statement that there was an accident while the team was leaving a warehouse, where they unloaded food aid brought to Gaza by sea.
The organization said the convoy had traveled in a deconflicted zone, while in armored cars branded with their logo, and that after coordinating its movements with Israel’s military, they would conduct an investigation of the incident “at the highest levels.” The CEO of World Central Kitchen called it an attack.
“This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war,” she said.
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.
According to the Israeli government, it has been 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.
There was a promise made a few days ago that WE would keep pushing for food into Gaza even though there wasn’t much aid in. Now those plans are up in the air — it says it will be “making decisions about the future of our work soon.”
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.”
According to international experts, some 30% of Gaza’s population is already facing “catastrophic” levels of hunger and could see famine sometime between now and May.
The second shipment of shelf-stable items left Cyprus on Saturday with dates in honor of Islam’s holiest month. According to the Associated Press, a statement by the Cypriot foreign ministry said that some 100 metric tons of aid had been unloaded in the Gaza Strip and that the rest would be returned to Cyprus.
In a Reuters interview Wednesday, humanitarian chef Andrés said “The U.S. must do more to tell Prime Minister Netanyahu this war needs to end now.” He believed that the aid workers had been targeted by Israeli forces.
U.S. and foreign leaders as well as international organizations are offering their condolences and condemnations, and calling for an independent investigation into the Israeli military strike.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides food assistance to a starving population, according to the organization’s commissioner-general.
An Australia Prime Minister Revisites the Case of Israel Air Strikes: “These are the World Central Kitchen aid workers killed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza”
The family of James Kirby, who was 47, said in a statement issued by the U.K. government that they were “incredibly proud” of his work, which included military tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and that he would be remembered as a hero.
But some family members have told British media Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response — “There was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip. “This happens in a war.
“They are not soldiers, they are there to help and feed people.” Making them a target is unacceptable. Their response for us as a family wasn’t nice to listen to,” Adam McGuire, Kirby’s cousin, told the BBC.
The Palestinian worker who was killed was from the southern part of Gaza. He had worked for World Central Kitchen as a driver and translator since the beginning of the year, the AP reported.
Polish citizen Damian Sobol, 35, was identified by a local government leader in his hometown of Przemysl on social media, saying, “There are no words to describe the feelings of people who knew this amazing young man right now… May he rest in peace.
Polish President Andrzej Duda also praised the killed workers. “These brave people changed the world for the better with their service and dedication to others. He wrote on X that this tragedy should never have happened.
Jacob Flickinger was a US and Canadian dual citizen who died. He had served as an infantryman in the Canadian armed forces before working in Mexico with World Central Kitchen.
All three British citizens who died had previously served in the country’s military and were using their experience in conflict zones to help safeguard the work of the charity’s staff members as they moved around Gaza.
The prime minister of Australia paid tribute to Frankcom on Tuesday, saying that it was completely unacceptable. Australia expects full accountability for the deaths of aid workers.”
Source: These are the World Central Kitchen aid workers killed by Israeli airstrike in Gaza
Australian Aid Worker Lzawmi Frankcom, 43, Died in Gaza, in the Light of the “World Central Kitchen” Attack
” Dear Zomi, I don’t know what to say.” but I promise you, your spirit will always be with us,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. He went so far as to say he wished he hadn’t started the charity because she would still be alive today.
World Central Kitchen, the food charity founded by chef José Andrés to help feed people in disaster zones, has identified the three Britons and the other volunteers who were Australian, Palestinian, Polish and a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.
She had helped people during brush fires in her native Australia, supported the Navajo Nation during the COVID-19 pandemic and fed Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion.
Australian aid worker Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, 43, a relief lead for World Central Kitchen, died “doing the work she loves,” her family said in a statement to media.
The UN’s humanitarian czar stated that more than 200 humanitarian workers have been killed in the Palestinian territories since October.
On Wednesday, the bodies of the six foreigners were sent out of Gaza into Egypt on their way to their home countries, The Associated Press reported. The Palestinian’s family received his remains and were able to bury him in Gaza.
The attack on the aid workers was not intentional, according to Benjamin Netanyahu. In a message Tuesday, the Israeli military apologized to World Central Kitchen and praised the group for bringing aid to Gaza after the October attack, saying that it would make public the findings of its investigation.
