Since it was founded by chef José Andrés in the wake of Haiti's devastating earthquake in 2010, relief organization World Central Kitchen has maintained its goal of doing what chefs do best: feeding people. and has responded to some of the world's greatest disasters, crises and conflicts. .
The nonprofit works with local food providers, governments, and restaurateurs to quickly scale up and feed people in need. The organization said last week in an update on its operations in Gaza that the devastation and need on the ground were “the most dire we have ever seen or experienced in our 15-year history.” ” he said.
The organization announced on Tuesday that it would suspend operations in Gaza and the region after it said seven of its employees were killed in an airstrike. The organization said Israeli forces were behind the attack.
The suspension deprives Gaza's increasingly starving population of a round of humanitarian food aid, at a time when virtually every food source is essential to stave off the impending famine that experts have been warning of for weeks. become.
The group operates 68 “community kitchens” in Gaza and says it has sent more than 1,700 trucks of food and cooking equipment so far into the nearly six-month war.
World Central Kitchen is a relatively new aid agency in the Gaza Strip, where people have relied heavily on humanitarian aid for decades due to a long Israeli blockade. But the group is gaining attention for its bold actions. In March, it built a temporary pier made of rubble, making it the first group to deliver aid by sea to the enclave in nearly 20 years.
The group said the rescue ship, which arrived in mid-March, delivered 200 tons of rice, flour and lentils, as well as canned tuna, chicken and beef. The second, larger cargo departed from Cyprus on Saturday.
The group said the aid was unloaded from the ship and distributed by truck to the Gaza Strip, adding it was working with the Israeli military. The group said the workers killed this week were emerging from an aid warehouse in central Gaza.
“Logistics is the Achilles' heel of any disaster response,” Andres wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 2020 regarding the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Efforts to send aid to Gaza via the Mediterranean coast grew out of aid agencies' complaints that supplies coming in from land were being blocked by Israeli inspections at border crossings. World Central Kitchen said that out of the approximately 20 trucks it sends to the Rafah crossing in southern Gaza each day, an average of 10 are entering Gaza, and that there were days when not a single truck could pass.
The nonprofit organization has grown rapidly in recent years, with donations and grants exceeding $500 million in 2022, a fourfold increase from the previous year in the most recent years for which figures are available. As of 2022, it was announced that the number of employees in this organization is his 94 people.
They fed Puerto Rico in the days after Hurricane Maria, sent volunteers to earthquake-hit Morocco, and distributed food in Ukraine in the midst of the Russian invasion.
In Ukraine, a restaurant operated by World Central Kitchen in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, was attacked by a missile less than two months after the start of the war, injuring four staff members. According to the Group CEO at that time.
