tel aviv — World Central Kitchen, a food charity founded by celebrity Spanish-American chef Jose Andres, has hired Jacob Flickinger, 33, a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Seven team members killed in Israeli airstrike Late Monday night in Gaza. Other WCK staff killed in the attack, which the Israeli military described as a “grave mistake”, have been identified as Palestinian, British, Polish and Australian.
The three-vehicle convoy appears to have been hit by several consecutive missile attacks, even though the nonprofit group was coordinating the team's movements with the Israel Defense Forces.
Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi said, “This was a mistake caused by misidentification at night, during wartime, under extremely complex circumstances,'' echoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's statement, which lamented the accident as a tragic accident. , said: “It happens in war.”
world central kitchen
The US government is outraged by the death toll and has joined Britain and other countries in calling on Israel to conduct a swift and impartial investigation.
“It has instilled in Israelis an absolute obligation to go the extra mile to protect the lives of civilians, including Palestinian children, women and men, and aid workers,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday.
The response to Israel's relentless war against Hamas, sparked by the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by a Palestinian group that killed about 1,200 people, has sharpened the relationship between Tel Aviv and the United States, longtime Israel's most valuable ally. It's making me even more nervous. Health officials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip do not distinguish between deaths of fighters and civilians, but since the war began, Israel has killed more than 32,000 people in the enclave, most of them He said they were women and children.
Under the agreement signed during the Obama administration, the United States agreed to give Israel $3.8 billion worth of annual military aid. That assistance, which includes commissioning both guided “smart” bombs and less accurate “dumb” bombs, comes despite increasing pressure from Washington on the IDF to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza. , continues.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the tensions between the close allies over Israel's plan to launch a ground offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Approximately 1.5 million Palestinians have flown into Rafah and surrounding areas along Gaza's southern border with Egypt, seeking refuge from Israeli military attacks in other parts of the Strip. Thousands of people are living in tents and other makeshift shelters, and aid agencies say there is little access to basic necessities to reach those in need.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, his cabinet and military commanders have insisted on the need to annihilate the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah, and the United States has threatened to force Israel to commit a full-scale attack without a credible plan to protect and evacuate civilians. Although it has repeatedly warned against launching attacks, the White House continued to support Israel's right to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas.
Meanwhile, World Central Kitchen has ceased all operations in the Gaza Strip, making it even more difficult for the world to get much-needed food to the thousands of people in need in the devastated enclave. ing.
Before the incident, WCK had announced that it had shipped. Over 37 million meals sent to Gaza Since the war began on October 7th.
“This is not just an attack on WCK, but on humanitarian organizations in the most dire situations where food is being used as a weapon of war,” Erin Gore, the group's CEO, said in a statement. He called out to Israel. I feel like I can't forgive it.
in a long social media postAndres called on the Israeli government to “stop killing civilians and aid workers and stop using food as a weapon.”
“Israel is better than the way this war is being waged,” he said in a New York Times op-ed.
