José Andrés, the founder of the World Central Kitchen, told Associated Press that an Israeli air strike killed at least four international volunteers 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 it was investigating the report at the very highest levels to understand how the incident happened.

The renowned Spanish-born chef said in a statement that several of his brother and sisters were killed in an IDF air strike in Gaza. I am heartbroken and grieving for the families and friends and our whole WCK family.”

Just a few days ago, they vowed to keep pushing for food into Gaza until the aid got in via land. It will be making decisions about the future of our work soon, because those plans are up in the air.

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 fourth’s nationality was not immediately clear. A Palestinian driver was killed in the Gaza Strip, according to other reports.

In October of last year, after the Hamas militant group launched a massive attack on Israel that killed over a thousand people, the state invaded the isolated coastal enclave and took hundreds of hostages into Gaza.

He said that the Israeli government needs to stop indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop using food as a weapon, killing civilians and aid workers, and restrict humanitarian aid. There are no more innocent lives lost. Sharing humanity is what starts peace. It needs to start now.”

Three ships from Cyprus were moored offshore on Monday with 400 tons of food for the territory. It was the group’s second delivery by sea. 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.

The World Central Kitchen, Led by a humanitarian chef, fed crisis zones for years: How José Andrés pushed the other way on staff safety and staff safety

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.

While WCK gets perfect scores on watchdog sites like Charity Navigator and Charity Watch, there have been some concerns and criticisms raised recently about where exactly that money is going — including from within the organization itself.

When he founded the organization, he did not think it would happen. “And I almost wanted to pull World Central Kitchen immediately out of Ukraine. I was told by the locals that you couldn’t leave. We need you. Your organization is important to us.

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.

He also said that there were people who might not feel safe doing this job, but that should not be in humanitarian situations. I wouldn’t be able to tell anybody to do what I’m not willing to do on my own if I said that JoséAndrés puts people in danger.

President Barack Obama bestowed the National Humanities medals on Andrés, one of which he named one of Time’s most influential people. There were a lot of Democratic lawmakers who nominated Andrés for the peace prize.

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

The nonprofit Igor and Viktoria, founder and CEO, grew rapidly after World Central Kitchen was struck by a hurricane in 2010

The nonprofit has grown rapidly since it was founded. A New York Times story says that in 2022, it brought in 500 million dollars in contributions and grants, fourfold more than 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.)

In Buffalo, N.Y., after 10 people were killed in a mass shooting at a supermarket, it delivered hot meals to the neighborhood and provided food after the Uvalde school shooting in Texas.

In the aftermath of major floods in California and Hawaii, as well as the government shutdown and stranded cruise ship passengers, it gave food to front line workers and other vulnerable groups.

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. 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 same year that he expected to see more chefs getting involved in disaster response, since “restaurant people” are particularly well suited to managing chaos.

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 nonprofit said in a statement that the team was hit while leaving a warehouse where they had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza by sea, a route that World Central Kitchen helped establish just last month.

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.” Erin Gore, the CEO of World Central Kitchen, called it a “targeted attack.”

“This is more than an attack against WCK, it’s an attack on humanitarian organizations that show up in some of the most dire situations where food is being used as a weapon of war,” she said.

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

It has been working on the ground in the region since Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and killed more than 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government. The Gaza ministry of health reported that more than 31,000 Palestinians were killed and 1.7 million were displaced in the Israeli military response.

Children are dying of starvation, according to a joint statement by Gore and Andrés. “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

Reply to the “Comment on ‘The Israeli War of Independence'” by U.S. and foreign leaders’ “Considers and condemnations”

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.