World Central Kitchen said on Sunday it would resume operations in Gaza with a local team of Palestinian aid workers, nearly a month after the Israeli military killed seven of the organization’s workers in targeted drone strikes on its convoy.
Israeli military officials have said the attack was a “serious mistake” and cited a series of failures, including a breakdown in communication and violations of army operating procedures.
The Washington-based aid group said it was still calling for an independent international investigation into the April 1 attack and had not received “any concrete assurances” that the Israeli military’s operating procedures had changed. But the “humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire,” the aid group’s director of operations, Erin Gore, said in a statement.
“We are restarting our operation with the same energy, dignity and focused on feeding as many people as possible,” he said.
The aid group said it had distributed more than 43 million meals in Gaza so far and had trucks carrying the equivalent of nearly 8 million meals waiting to enter the enclave through the Rafah crossing in the south. World Central Kitchen said it was also planning to send trucks to Gaza through Jordan and would open a kitchen in Al-Mawasi, a small coastal village that the Israeli military designated as a “humanitarian zone” safe for civilians, although attacks have occurred. over there. continued.
Six of the seven workers who died in the April 1 attack were from Western countries: three from Britain, one from Australia, one from Poland and one with dual citizenship of the United States and Canada. The seventh was Palestinian. They were killed in consecutive Israeli drone attacks on their vehicles while traveling towards Rafah after unloading food aid that had arrived by sea.
The attack prompted World Central Kitchen to immediately suspend its operations in Gaza and sparked outrage from some of Israel’s closest allies.
The movements of the World Central Kitchen convoy had been coordinated in advance with the Israeli military, but some officers had not reviewed coordination documentation detailing which cars were part of the convoy, the military said.
According to the United Nations, some 200 aid workers, most of them Palestinians, died in Gaza between October 7 and the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy. A New York Times visual investigation showed that, long before the attack on World Central Kitchen, six aid groups in Gaza had been attacked by Israel despite sharing their locations with the Israeli military.
The attack forced World Central Kitchen to decide whether to end its efforts in Gaza or continue, “knowing that aid, humanitarian workers and civilians are being intimidated and killed,” Gore said in the statement.
“In the end, we decided that we needed to keep feeding ourselves and continue our mission of being there to provide food to people during the most difficult times,” he said.
At a memorial event in Washington for World Central Kitchen workers on Thursday, the group’s founder, celebrity chef José Andrés, said there were still “many unanswered questions about what happened and why,” and that the group aid still required an independent decision. investigation into the actions of the Israeli army.
The seven aid workers had “risked everything to feed people they didn’t know and will never know,” Andrés said. “They were the best of humanity.”