The Humanitarian Aid Shooting Galleries in Gaza

The lessons no one learned from the World Central Kitchen massacre(s)

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Late in the evening of April 1, 2024, the anonymous poster behind popular Hebrew-language Telegram channel “Dead Terrorists” shared with its 124,000 followers a chaotic video of a fresh batch of corpses lying on the floor in an anonymous dark room. There was a pale-skinned man in blood-smeared khakis and body armor, eyes still half-open, a Polish passport perched on his breast; a woman in dirt-spattered body armor and a helmet with an Australian passport; and a younger man with thick eyebrows, a blood-streaked face, and no apparent body armor or passport.

A caption in Hebrew read: “Good morning everyone, good morning also to their helpers … pussies with foreign passports called ‘aid organizations’ (a code name for terrorists from Western countries) who obtained 72 virgins without mustaches and sent them in a coffin to their country of origin.” The caption went on to report that the dead Polish “Nazi” had joined “his ancestors, the soldiers of Adolf Hitler, deep in the toasters and ovens of hell.”

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The corpses were humanitarian workers Damian Sobol, Zomi Frankcom, and Ayad Abutaha. Nochi Mandel, an Israeli army reservist colonel from the occupied West Bank, had ordered a subordinate to kill them and four colleagues—whose charred, unrecognizable remains lay in sheets alongside theirs—in precision drone strikes during the night. It quickly emerged that Mandel had nine weeks earlier signed an open letter to the War Cabinet, demanding members “do everything in your power” to prevent “humanitarian supplies and the operation of hospitals inside Gaza.” His division commander later told an Australian investigator he had explicitly warned Mandel earlier that evening, in a directive confirmed by his chief of staff, to refrain from bombing around humanitarian convoys that evening.

An analysis conducted by Al Jazeera and Forensic Architecture found more than 100 separate attacks on humanitarian convoys, warehouses, bakeries, and school distribution centers over the first 11 months of the Gaza onslaught. But Sobol, Frankcom, and Abutaha were not just any humanitarian workers; they were employees of World Central Kitchen, a trendy disaster relief nonprofit founded by a D.C. celebrity chef and personal friend of the Bidens whom Nancy Pelosi had just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

World Central Kitchen cooperated with Israel and the Biden administration to project the image that it was possible to feed Gaza with the right combination of courage and ingenuity.

That chef, Spain-born José Andrés, went out of his way to ingratiate himself and WCK to the Israeli military and establishment. Linda Roth, a communications executive who came to WCK following a long career working for former AIPAC staffer Wolf Blitzer, deleted every instance of the words “blockade” and “siege” from the organization’s posts and press releases. WCK spent months preparing sometimes elaborate kosher meals for displaced victims of the October 7 attacks. Andrés commissioned a Spanish rescue nonprofit with which he had worked in Ukraine to build a jetty on the beach, and unloaded a tugboat carrying 200 tons of food from its warehouse in Cyprus; the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had not only given the project its full endorsement, it had posted aerial photos of the jetty’s first delivery on its social media pages. Andrés and his disaster relief group had “established enough credibility in Israel for authorities to view the group as being trustworthy and even-handed,” an admiring Haaretz profile explained.

While former World Central Kitchen staffers speak glowingly of their old colleagues and the profound sense of purpose they say has long united the organization’s “food first responders,” five told the Prospect their old workplace cooperated with Israel and the Biden administration to project the image that it was possible to feed Gaza with the right combination of courage and ingenuity. In one early video, for example, staffers showed off stoves fueled by special wooden pellets to circumvent Israel’s fuel ban; in another, Sobol gave viewers a tour of the saltwater filtration system WCK had installed at its Rafah kitchen to get around the IDF’s relentless attacks on Gaza’s water supply.

But the U.N. and Oxfam criticized WCK’s efforts as absurdist distractions, when hundreds of trucks filled with food were stuck at the borders for no reason beyond the sheer sadism of the army that was cynically facilitating WCK airdrops. (Andrés himself seemed to confirm this when he flew to Egypt and posted a depressing Instagram video of the “endless, endless, endless” line of trucks waiting to enter Gaza at the Rafah border crossing.) But while WCK never had the capacity to make a legitimate dent in Gaza’s ocean of need, that did not stop Roth from projecting the image that it was working miracles. She announced to the staff in February 2024 that WCK was bringing in an astounding 62 percent of the aid that was reaching Gaza—“way more than the UN,” she said, according to former WCK videographer Ramsey Telhami.

The assertion was preposterous: Israeli army figures show that the food aid delivered by U.N. agencies dwarfs that of all the non-U.N. NGOs combined, but five former staffers told the Prospect that WCK, which currently claims it has provided 130 million meals to Gazans since the start of the war, was notorious for inflating its own statistics on the meals it had served, then promoting staffers on the basis of fraudulent numbers. “WCK is all optics. People might have these titles like ‘director of operations’ but everyone knows their real job is to post,” Praba Sechachelem, a former operations director, told the Prospect. Former chef corps director Elyssa Kaplan concurred: “We had these emergency activation kits, and they literally contained T-shirts, decals, World Central Kitchen branded tarps. Not band-aids, not bug spray. I learned how to make an Instagram video before I learned CPR.”

World Central Kitchen did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

On the morning before the attack, a glowing profile on the front page of The Wall Street Journal had hailed Andrés as “The Celebrity Chef Who Beat the US Military at Getting Aid Into Gaza.” But when the staffers of the “trustworthy” organization had attempted to unload the contents of a second tugboat and drive them to their base of operations in southern Gaza, their efforts were met with Hermes 450 drones, equipped with precision Spike missiles. The Journal had to update its article with a new title: “Celebrity Chef José Andrés Says Aid Workers Killed in Gaza.”

For the first week or two, the chef and his friends in establishment politics and media acknowledged the unambiguous murderousness of what had just happened. Outlets that had typically reported Palestinian deaths in passive terms noted the workers had been taken out in “precision strikes.” Pelosi called it an “outrage,” demanded an independent investigation, even hinted she might call for an arms embargo. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who had been a guest on Andrés’s podcast a year earlier, ordered a pause in a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. The Polish foreign minister demanded an “urgent explanation” for the murders from the Israeli ambassador. And Andrés himself wrote a New York Times op-ed, ridiculing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dubious claim that it was a tragic accident: “It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.” The Guardian commended Andrés for leading “a backlash over Gaza against Netanyahu that no protest or politician could have matched.”

But then it was over. The grieving families returned to their respective homes, and Andrés returned his social media feed to hyping book launches, restaurant openings, and new calamities to which WCK, which partners with restaurants, food trucks, and stadium owners to feed the victims of natural disasters, was deploying its “food first responders.” A pseudo-investigation conducted by a high-ranking Australian Air Force official concluded with tortured logic that the murders reflected “errors in decision-making … likely compounded by confirmation bias,” as opposed to war crimes. The bomb shipments to Israel began flowing once again, while aid trucks once again stalled, from a peak of 6,300 permitted to enter Gaza in May to just 1,789 in October, covering about three and a half days of basic needs by most estimates. In July, the IDF killed another WCK staffer, according to an Al Jazeera report, followed in August by an attack on a truck en route to a hospital owned by WCK’s partner organization Anera, and then another strike killing four staffers in November.

THIS APRIL 1, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE MASSACRE, a month after it had cut off all food and water to Gaza and three days after the IDF killed Jalal, yet another WCK volunteer, an IDF fighter jet dropped a missile on a building directly adjacent to a commissary kitchen in Al-Mawasi, which WCK had renamed “Damian’s Kitchen” in honor of Sobol. No one was immediately killed, though multiple unnamed “team members” were hospitalized and reported in a sterile press release to be in “stable condition.” Photos and footage showed a large food pantry half-buried in the gray pebbles of an obliterated concrete wall.

This time, Andrés’s response was meager and almost apologetic. “@netanyahu please Sir can we go back to the ceasefire, the negotiations to release the hostages that are still alive asap, and the re-opening of the humanitarian aid?” he posted on X. “We will not resolve deep issues hitting civilians everyday … The Palestinian people are not the enemy … They are your future partners where Israel and Palestine can live in Peace … 🙏🕊️”

But if Andrés is still trying to appeal to Netanyahu’s proverbial “better angels,” he has been a bit harsher on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the upstart NGO whose dystopian delivery mechanisms and internal turmoil made headlines recently after it was essentially awarded a monopoly on administering food aid in Gaza, following three months of forced starvation.

In some ways, GHF is the antithesis of World Central Kitchen: the latter being an indisputable outgrowth of Andrés’s career as a chef, the former the brainchild of the venture capitalist who “discovered” WeWork and a longtime executive for the company formerly known as Blackwater, with help from an entrepreneur who spent years in the IDF unit famous for developing apps that use artificial intelligence to maximize the number of civilians killed in drone assassinations of Hamas officials. The WCK Instagram feed is filled with photos of nourishing stews and rich ragout being stirred and served to grateful locals by sweat-streaked, smiling chefs; the photos from GHF’s first day in operation depicted thousands of emaciated, blood-streaked Palestinians crammed into a mazelike metal contraption for biometric scanning in faint hopes of winning a cardboard box of dry pasta, dry beans, flour, and rice.

At the same time, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation can also be accurately seen as a MAGA-fied sequel to the doomed collaboration between Andrés and Israeli authorities. As The New York Times tells it, the trio of WeWork VC Michael Eisenberg, cybersecurity guru Liran Tancman, and former Constellis executive and CIA officer Phil Reilly created GHF—along with an affiliated for-profit contractor called Safe Reach Solutions—as a way to “undermine Hamas’s control of Gaza, prevent food from falling into militants’ hands or the black market, and bypass” the “anti-Israeli bias” of the United Nations, of whose agencies a GHF consultant lamented Israel has traditionally been “at the mercy.” What you will not learn from the newspaper is that the first two of those three concerns are wholly fake: U.N. World Food Program chief Cindy McCain flatly told Face the Nation on May 25 that Hamas was not diverting humanitarian aid, though aid trucks have been systematically looted by cigarette-smuggling gangs operating with extensive IDF protection and cooperation, and an open letter authored by 11 international aid NGOs described GHF’s real aim as to serve as a “blueprint for ethnic cleansing” the Gaza Strip.

Bypassing the U.N. has been a long-term goal of fascists in many parts of the world for decades, and Israel’s rabid strain of anti-U.N. animus reminds us why. Netanyahu has long demonized the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which administers a large proportion of the occupied territories’ schools, food banks, housing complexes, community kitchens, and bakeries, for having the temerity to build the foundations of a Palestinian state, something Israel’s prime minister has spent his lifetime trying to prevent. Israel gloated after the 1967 war over the bargain it had scored when it convinced U.N. member states to pay for services in the new territories its army had conquered, but it would soon grow to bitterly resent the autonomy that financial independence created. And so Israel has invented a whole UNRWA mythology in which its schools indoctrinate Palestinian youth in antisemitism, its slums nurture their “victim mentality,” and its office buildings harbor terrorists in plain sight.

Last January, literally minutes after South Africa brought its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, the Israeli government announced it had discovered that 12 of UNRWA’s 12,000 employees in Gaza had participated in the October 7 attacks, prompting a near-instantaneous announcement that the Biden administration’s U.S. Agency for International Development would discontinue the UNRWA funding it had just restored after the first Trump administration cut it off during the 2018 Great March of Return protests. In October, the Knesset passed laws banishing UNRWA from its borders, shuttering its schools and banning its government officials from communicating with the organization. Israel never produced a shred of corroborating evidence that a single UNRWA worker had participated in October 7. Even as the State Department encouraged staffers to report any suspicions that federal funding was being somehow diverted to UNRWA to the Office of Inspector General, it greeted the Knesset’s actions with concerned statements describing the institution it had formally agreed to defund as vital and irreplaceable, signifying the Biden administration’s deep denial over the more strategic elements of Israel’s campaign of extermination.

But in hindsight, the swift move to place the very foundation of Palestinian existence on an international terror pariah list was perhaps the most incontrovertible evidence that there was a strategy behind the slaughter. “The thing you have to understand is this: Only UNRWA has the infrastructure to stop Gaza starving to death,” says Chris Gunness, a former journalist and UNRWA spokesman who currently directs the Myanmar Accountability Project. “UNRWA has the warehouses, it has the distribution centers, it has the staff and since May 1, 1950, it has the long track record of working in the community. And the donor community is responsible for this. The donor community defunded UNRWA on the basis of nothing.”

AFTER THE MURDERS LAST APRIL, WCK abandoned its jetty, pulled non-Palestinian staffers from Gaza, and eased up on its social media output on Gaza. But the dream of “disrupting” the famine using novel supply chains, private donors, and extensive coordination with the IDF lived on in Fogbow, a company founded by a collection of former CIA officers who had graduated to the lucrative world of corporate espionage. (In a statement received after press time, Fogbow objects to the term “espionage,” noting that its staff members have experience in “corporate intelligence.”) Similar to WCK, the corporate spies had originally founded Fogbow as a disaster relief startup, when “all of a sudden Gaza started,” as president Mick Mulroy, a former Trump defense undersecretary, later explained.

Fogbow’s original business model involved transporting aid to Gaza through maritime channels originating in Cyprus. The organization later signed onto the short-lived “floating pier” the Pentagon spent $320 million building last spring, despite near-universal agreement that the money would be more efficiently spent bribing the troops manning the border checkpoints. When the pier collapsed last May after just 21 days of sporadic operation, Fogbow adjusted their investor pitch back to highlight this proposed “quay” from Cyprus to southern Gaza. Officials they pitched on the project described it as “crackpot” and wholly divorced from the reality in Gaza and assumed they had ulterior motives, perhaps rooted in getting in on the ground floor of a potential rebuilding effort.

Then the Knesset outlawed UNRWA, Trump won the election, and the IDF insisted one of the WCK staffers killed in a drone strike had participated in the October 7 attacks, while ordering Andrés to fire an additional 62 staffers on the same grounds. “We do not know the basis for Israel’s decision to flag these individuals,” World Central Kitchen declared in a statement, but it complied nonetheless. “It is a joke,” one of the downsized employees told Reuters.

Fogbow suddenly had a path, and they kicked off with a whale of a hire: David Beasley, a former World Food Program chief (and South Carolina governor) known for using his perch to conduct off-the-books diplomatic missions, along with his former top aide Gavin Gramstad, an ardent Christian Zionist credited with convincing Sudan to join the Abraham Accords by dangling a $20 million USAID package. Just a week after his Fogbow gig was announced, Beasley was reported to be in talks to helm the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a job he has apparently thus far turned down.

Fogbow did not initially respond to questions from the Prospect, but in a statement received after press time, the organization said: “Fogbow is not involved in any way—directly or indirectly—with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Neither our organization, nor any of our advisors or personnel, are affiliated with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or any associated entity.”

It’s true that both projects have similar supposed goals and corporate structures, including nonprofits based dually in Wyoming and Geneva (though last week, Switzerland forced the GHF to dissolve its subsidiary there for failure to comply with basic requirements), for-profit sister companies staffed with former spooks and Special Forces veterans, and inscrutable intentions. But where GHF has been exposed as an explicitly Israeli creation, Fogbow is murkier: Its principals have indicated to humanitarian groups that they have the blessing of the IDF but funding from Gulf States, along with a partnership with the Palestinian real estate developer Bashar Masri, whom Gunness describes as a “rent-a-Palestinian.” Whatever the case, we all have limits, and Beasley, for whatever reason, was unwilling to sign on with the GHF.

It’s become easy to see why. Just a single distribution depot opened on the first day, drawing starved bodies as far as the eye could see swarming around the threadbare distribution depots. Jake Wood, the CEO hired in lieu of Beasley, resigned before the effort even began, and his chief operating officer followed. “I think he did realize if you’re trying to distribute aid to starving people and it’s not done on the basis of humanitarian principles, the people will get desperate, the IDF will open fire, and then you’ll get another infamous ‘Flour Massacre’ when the IDF hired mercenaries to distribute aid and ended up wounding 780 people,” said Gunness, the former UNRWA spokesman, not even bothering to mention that an additional 118 Palestinians were killed in the Flour Massacre.

That would prove predictably prescient: Three days after we spoke, gunmen opened fire on the GHF distribution site in Rafah, and the IDF near-instantaneously denied they had done so. But the International Red Cross reported it had admitted 179 Palestinians, many arriving in donkey carts, to its field hospital after the attack. Twenty-one were dead on arrival, and an additional ten died soon afterward, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The IDF released a random, inconclusive video of “masked gunmen” patrolling the area that it claimed exonerated them. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, the self-appointed leader of the 20-month effort to professionally blacklist college students who express solidarity with Palestine and punish media outlets he deems insufficiently pro-Israel, quickly clapped back at The Washington Post and CNN for reporting that the IDF had opened fire. “@JeffBezos this false story was debunked hours ago,” Ackman tweeted. “How can the @washingtonpost report it as true? This is worthy of an internal investigation.” CNN quickly changed its headline to accommodate the IDF’s denials, leaving the cause of death of 31 more starved Palestinians officially ambiguous, even as an IDF source told The New York Times its troops had fired “warning shots” at the crowd. (Two days later the IDF opened fire again at the same distribution point, killing another 27.)

It seemed somewhat atavistic that the army had bothered denying the latest flour massacre at all, just hours after arch-Zionist Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) greeted news that climate activist Greta Thunberg was joining a Freedom Flotilla mission to bring food to Gaza via ship with a sassy reference to the army’s apparent bombing of another humanitarian vessel in Malta last month: “Hope Greta and her friends can swim!”

In a statement to the press upon his resignation, Wood said he could not helm the effort and uphold humanitarian values, adding: “I urge Israel to significantly expand the provision of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms, and I urge all stakeholders to continue to explore innovative new methods for the delivery of aid, without delay, diversion, or discrimination.”

“For once it would be nice,” Gunness quipped with a sigh, “if one of these people would give UNRWA a shout-out.”

UPDATE: This story has been updated to include statements from Fogbow about its staff members’ experience in corporate intelligence and its lack of a connection to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The story has also been changed from its initial version to clarify that Fogbow sought a maritime route for humanitarian aid from Cyprus prior to the Biden administration’s floating pier in Gaza.

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