A few weeks before seven World Central Kitchen aid workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike, Israel’s Defense Ministry issued a request to Anera, another humanitarian group operating in Gaza. The ministry wanted the coordinates of Anera’s offices, distribution centers, shelters and other places where the organization’s employees work or live.
It was the second time that Anera had been asked to provide such coordinates, said its president and chief executive, Sean Carroll, whose group partners with chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen (WCK) in Gaza. The process, similar to what WCK said it had also undertaken, is designed to create deconflicted zones — safe spaces for civilians, humanitarian workers and the like — amid the Israel-Gaza war.
The process didn’t save Mousa Shawwa.
Shawwa, Anera’s logistics coordinator in Gaza, was killed on March 8 by an Israeli airstrike while he was in a deconflicted shelter, Carroll told The Washington Post. Shawwa had just returned from an aid mission — delivering water, blankets and other items — and was relaxing over coffee with his family and a neighbor, Carroll said. The relief worker’s 6-year-old son, Karim, died 10 days later from injuries suffered during the attack.
“I don’t have anything indicating that [Shawwa] was targeted, but I also don’t have anything indicating that he wasn’t,” Carroll said. “There was some sense from our team that they were targeting someone else. But we’ve never gotten an explanation.”
Less than a month later, another Israeli airstrike hit a WCK convoy, killing seven relief workers in an attack that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was “unintentional.” In an Instagram post early Wednesday, Andrés wrote that the seven WCK workers who were killed “were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.”
As with Anera, Andrés said in an interview on Wednesday with Reuters that WCK had communicated with Israeli military about the aid workers’ whereabouts. “What I know is that we were targeted deliberately nonstop until everybody was dead in this convoy,” Andrés said. “This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place.”
The WCK attack was the last straw for Anera: After the death of Shawwa and some other near misses for its workers, the organization announced Tuesday that it would pause operations in Gaza. Carroll said the shutdown marked the first time since Anera was founded in 1968 that the group had ceased operations in an occupied Palestinian territory.
“We worked through intifadas and through previous wars and bombing campaigns, and hadn’t stopped in nearly six months of this war,” Carroll said. “So it’s not easy. It’s not easy to know that we’re providing lifesaving help and we have to stop that.”
The withdrawal of Anera and other organizations from the war-battered region — after the Monday strike, WCK said that it was halting its work there, and at least two other groups followed suit — put a spotlight on the dangers facing aid workers struggling to feed starving and hungry Palestinians, Ukrainians, Haitians and more. In Gaza and other conflict-ridden areas around the globe, workers whose mission it is to provide food encounter snarled delivery routes, inadequate supplies, downed communications — and potential danger at every turn.
In Gaza, 203 workers providing humanitarian aid have been killed since Oct. 7, according to the Aid Worker Security Database, which tracks attacks on humanitarian workers around the globe. That compares with more than 260 who were killed around the globe in all of 2023, according to a report by Humanitarian Outcomes and the Global Interagency Security Forum. That 2023 number is more than twice as many as the average annual total of the previous three years, the report said.
It isn’t clear how many of those killed in Gaza were providing food, said Abby Stoddard, a partner at Humanitarian Outcomes, which maintains the list. Many of them weren’t on duty, she notes, but died alongside their families.
For those left trying to get flour and other necessities to the people of Gaza, the attack on the aid workers only underscores the importance of their mission.
Steve Taravella, senior spokesman for the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP), said the organization will remain in the region, where it was working even before the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 that led to Israel’s declaration of war. Before the war, the group partnered with grocery stores and bakeries, but those businesses have mostly shuttered, Taravella said, hit by power outages and an inability to get supplies. Now, the program is focused on getting what it can — cans of chickpeas, date bars, flour — directly to people.
“People are dying, are literally dying from hunger. So it’s essential that we stay and provide them with food,” he said. “But the conditions there are just horrific.”
The WFP was able to get only 47 trucks into north Gaza in March, though it estimates that 300 trucks — a day — are needed.
“We all feel a bond with each other because we know the challenges of doing this kind of work,” Taravella said. “So when we see something like this, whether it’s a U.N. colleague, or another organization like World Central Kitchen, we feel deeply (a) that could be us, right? And (b) it’s a death that did not need to happen. And to see it happen to somebody who was there doing something to relieve suffering of others …”
Still, Taravella said he feels “uncomfortable” talking about the risks workers face. “It would be unfortunate if the focus was on ‘woe is us,’” he said. “Right now, the people who are truly suffering are people who have gone for months with insufficient food to sustain their bodies, on a calorie count that has left many of them in genuine starvation.”
When President Biden expressed outrage at the deaths, he added: “This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed. This is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult — because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians.”
Relief workers will tell you there is a sliding scale of risk when serving food to people in need, especially for a group like WCK, which deals with a variety of situations. When the U.S. government shut down in late 2018 and early 2019, for instance, WCK faced virtually zero risk in feeding furloughed federal workers.
But the risks escalate as organizations move into natural disaster zones. In the days following Hurricane Florence in 2018, an all-terrain vehicle loaded with hot food slid off a flooded road and started to take on water in rural North Carolina, far from anything resembling civilization. The harrowing moment was captured in director Ron Howard’s documentary “We Feed People,” about Andrés and the humanitarian organization he founded.
War zones and destabilized countries, however, are a whole different situation. WCK has set up a network of kitchens to feed displaced families in Haiti as corruption and gang violence have ripped the country apart, bringing state institutions “close to collapse,” according to a U.N. Human Rights Office report from this year.
But Ukraine was the first active conflict in which WCK set up operations to deliver meals. In April 2022, just two months after Russia invaded the country, a missile hit a relief kitchen in Kharkiv, one operating with support from WCK. Four kitchen staffers were hospitalized with burns, some severe. It was the first time that one of WCK’s relief kitchens had come under attack since the organization was founded in 2010.
But compared with Ukraine, Gaza carries even higher risks. “There is nowhere safe in Gaza. You’re in a closed environment. Israel is bombing. You’ve got Hamas militants that are fighting. Civilians are stuck in the middle. You’re trapped. There is nowhere to go. Everything is destroyed. Bombs are falling everywhere,” said a former WCK employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak for the group.
“Ukraine is good guys, bad guys,” the former employee continued. “Let’s stay on the good guys’ side. I don’t worry about — unless some freak accident happened or something — but I don’t worry about Ukrainians shooting at us.”
Michael Capponi, founder and president of the disaster relief organization Global Empowerment Mission (GEM), said no one on his teams in Ukraine has been killed despite sending hundreds of aid trucks to villages near the front lines. Part of the reason, Capponi said, is that the Ukrainian military keeps GEM updated about Russian missile attacks or tanks moving into the area. The relief workers have plenty of intel.
But GEM also doesn’t let the Russian Federation know where the organization plans to distribute food. “I’ve chosen to never do that, because I think there’s more risk in letting them know what we’re doing than not letting them know,” the founder said.
In Gaza, GEM has adopted the lessons it learned in Haiti, where the organization has operated for years, navigating around gangs that attempt to steal aid destined for vulnerable residents of the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean. GEM stores supplies — food, water, blankets, mattresses and more — in warehouses in southern Gaza, where the organization will pack covered, unmarked trucks for distribution to locations farther north. GEM will even rent vehicles from local businesses to disguise its aid activities.
GEM trucks never travel in convoys, either. The subterfuge isn’t designed to avoid attacks by the Israel Defense Forces, Capponi said. “It was more about a theft and looting issue.”
Stoddard, the partner at Humanitarian Outcome, said the world of disaster and humanitarian aid has gotten more professional than it was decades ago — and deadlier.
Organizations offering aid in conflict zones have developed more sophisticated training to help keep workers safe, she said. “Twenty years ago, there wasn’t any training. There weren’t even security manuals for most organizations,” she said. “I think in the past, you would see less experienced people doing more seat-of-the-pants- (we used to call it cowboy-) type stuff. Now it’s more buttoned-down and really professional people.”
Depending on the situation (and budgets), she said, aid workers might be trained in basic situational awareness and personal security. Most have protocols that staffers are told to follow, which may include abiding by curfews and governing how to travel. In dangerous areas, she said, there might be a rule that they must travel in convoys. Some offer an expensive course called HEAT, or hostile environment awareness training, which is a more involved scenario-based coaching.
Still, an increasing number are being killed, she said. “Even with all the professionalization and capacity building, you’re still seeing the long-term trend of aid worker fatalities going up.”
One reason is the conflicts themselves have gotten more complex. In Sudan, she noted, the number of aid workers killed went up after the 2015 peace accord. “Instead of circumscribed, warring parties, you now have a lot of quasi-militias and criminal gangs — and all of them have access to weapons,” Stoddard said. “Aid workers do present attractive targets for violence, because they have assets.”
Despite the risks in Gaza, GEM, unlike some of its peers, plans to continue delivering food and other aid to Palestinians. “Of course safety is so important for our teams,” Capponi said. “But if people don’t have aid there, they’re going to die. It’s that kind of situation.”
When it announced that it was “pausing” its operations in Gaza, WCK added: “We will be making decisions about the future of our work soon.” When Andrés was asked whether he had a sense when WCK might resume work there, he replied in a WhatsApp message, “Everything has its time …”
Anera, meanwhile, isn’t sure when it will restart operations in Gaza, even though the organization’s absence will mean 150,000 fewer meals a day in the territory, Carroll said. Even the group’s partner organizations — all 43 of them — are asking what the shutdown will mean for their aid efforts. Carroll has few answers.
“I don’t know how we start to feel safe until there’s a recognition in Israeli society and in Israeli government that, in fact, this [current] pathway does not make Israel and Israelis more secure. It makes them less secure,” Carroll said. “Until there’s a recognition that, you know, maybe killing aid workers is not the best way to promote our security, then I’m not sure that they can provide an answer” that will make Anera feel safe.
