Tweet Share Share Comment On Monday, Israel killed seven aid workers in Gaza. An Israel Defense Forces drone fired three missiles on their convoy, though the cars’ roofs were clearly marked. These aid workers weren’t the first to die in this war. According to the Aid Worker Security Database, at least 203 aid workers have been killed since the beginning of the conflict.
These seven workers, however, were employed by World Central Kitchen, a food relief nonprofit founded by Spanish celebrity chef José Andrés. Their deaths, unlike those of other aid workers—and many of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed since Oct. 7—have become international news and received not only thoughts and prayers but condemnation.
U.S. President Joe Biden put out a statement in which he said he was “outraged and heartbroken,” that the aid workers were “brave and selfless,” and that “Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians. … The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations, in order to avoid civilian casualties.” On Thursday, during a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “tense and challenging,” Biden for the first time called for an “immediate cease-fire” and stressed that the humanitarian situation is unacceptable; at a press conference the same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “If we don’t see the changes we need to see, there will be a change in our policy.” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was “appalled” and, like Biden, said he expected a thorough investigation. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said their deaths were “beyond any reasonable circumstances” and that Israel’s excuses were “not good enough.”
The Israeli government itself seemed to have realized how badly its armed forces had erred. IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi issued a rare apology. “I want to be very clear—the strike was not carried out with the intention of harming WCK aid workers,” he said Wednesday. “It was a mistake that followed a misidentification—at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened.” (In a statement Tuesday, WCK said that the workers had been traveling in a deconflicted zone and that they had coordinated movements with the IDF; as Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate, “The significance of the WCK killings, besides the tragedy itself, is that it shows that the Israeli military is not paying as much attention as it should to its deconfliction arrangements.”) And anti-government protests in Israel—which were growing before the attack on the WCK workers—may well be bolstered not only by the idea that those in power have failed to bring back more than 100 hostages for six months and counting, but also by a growing sense that they cannot manage to fight the war competently and achieve something besides mass death. That sense could be particularly acute now because, although Israel has a contentious relationship with UNRWA—the U.N. agency charged with providing relief to Palestinians, which Israel has accused of being infiltrated by Hamas—WCK has a different reputation. It has also provided meals to evacuated Israelis.
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Why have these seven deaths gotten public outrage from the U.S. president and an apology from the IDF when tens of thousands of other deaths have not?
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Fred Kaplan
The World Central Kitchen Killings Are a Tragedy—and an Important Sign
Read More There are several reasons. The first is, to put it very plainly, racism, or at least internalized prejudice. Though one of the seven WCK workers, Saif Issam Abu Taha, the driver and translator, was Palestinian, the other six were British, Australian, Polish, and U.S.–Canadian. Some deaths are expected and, worse, accepted by many in the Western and wider world who perhaps understand them as tragic but unavoidable, or who say: “War is destructive by nature.” Other deaths are not. Other deaths are shocking. They are understood, in Washington and Jerusalem alike, as something that was not supposed to happen. (Israel has since found that the strikes resulted from a series of mistakes that could have been avoided; one might ask whether Israel, or any country, is capable of an impartial investigation into its own military.) As Haaretz’s Amira Hass put it: “It’s hard to overstate the gravity of the decision to open fire and the headache the drone operators have caused the IDF and Israel’s PR efforts. This headache wouldn’t have happened if the seven dead had been Palestinians, not Westerners, as six of them were.”
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The second is that José Andrés is a celebrity. More particularly, he is a celebrity not just globally, but in Washington specifically, which hosts several of his restaurants—including The Bazaar, a go-to spot for the Democratic Party’s elite in the Biden era. It is one thing to watch the news or read an article about a war’s dead civilians. It is another to have the proprietor of the restaurant you frequent give an interview in which he says that his employees providing humanitarian aid were systematically targeted by the military that the administration you work for is arming.
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And the third is, to my mind, the most grim: These seven people were killed because they were trying to keep Palestinians from starving to death. They were doing something there should have been no need to do in the first place, and they died for it. Their deaths make clear that not only are all Palestinians in Gaza at risk, but so is anyone who tries to keep them from starving to death. After the strikes, WCK suspended its operations in Gaza; two other nongovernmental organizations, American Near East Refugee Aid and Project HOPE, did too. It’s a horrible thing to try to wrap one’s mind around: that there is no person famous enough or cause fundamental enough to protect those who would help Palestinians in Gaza, let alone Palestinians themselves, from being killed by Israel in this war.
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But ultimately, whether everyone is especially stunned by the killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers matters less than whether policy—in Israel, the United States, and around the world—will meaningfully change. The Washington Post reported that the U.S. approved the transfer of thousands of bombs to Israel on the day of the WCK strikes. The strikes have now been carried out. No statement, however apologetic or strongly worded, can bring those they killed back to life. And if the politics and policy around the war remain the same, those statements, however apologetic or strongly worded, won’t have said much of anything.
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- Joe Biden
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Why the World Central Kitchen Aid Workers’ Deaths Broke Through the Horror of This War
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05.04.2024
Tweet Share Share Comment On Monday, Israel killed seven aid workers in Gaza. An Israel Defense Forces drone fired three missiles on their convoy, though the cars’ roofs were clearly marked. These aid workers weren’t the first to die in this war. According to the Aid Worker Security Database, at least 203 aid workers have been killed since the beginning of the conflict.
These seven workers, however, were employed by World Central Kitchen, a food relief nonprofit founded by Spanish celebrity chef José Andrés. Their deaths, unlike those of other aid workers—and many of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed since Oct. 7—have become international news and received not only thoughts and prayers but condemnation.
U.S. President Joe Biden put out a statement in which he said he was “outraged and heartbroken,” that the aid workers were “brave and selfless,” and that “Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians. … The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations, in order to avoid civilian casualties.” On Thursday, during a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “tense and challenging,” Biden for the first time called for an “immediate cease-fire” and stressed that the humanitarian situation is unacceptable; at a press conference the same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “If we don’t see the changes we need to see, there will be a change in our policy.” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was “appalled” and, like Biden, said he expected a thorough investigation. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said their deaths were “beyond any reasonable circumstances” and that Israel’s excuses were “not good enough.”
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