WCK Founder: Aid Workers No Longer Safe in Gaza or Ukraine
World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés warns that international protections shielding humanitarian workers for nearly 80 years are being systematically breached in both Ukraine and Gaza, where seven of his own staff were killed last year.
José Andrés, founder of the food aid charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) and a Michelin-starred chef, has written that legal protections for humanitarian workers — enshrined in the fourth Geneva convention since 1949 — are increasingly being disregarded in today's deadliest conflicts.
According to the World Health Organization, Russia has struck healthcare targets in Ukraine more than 3,200 times since its full-scale invasion began in February 2022, roughly twice a day on average. Some of these are so-called "double-tap" strikes, where the same target is hit twice in quick succession, posing particular danger to first responders.
Andrés also cites UN Security Council testimony from April showing that at least 1,010 humanitarian workers died across 21 countries over the past three years, more than half of them in Gaza and the West Bank — three times the 377 killed in the preceding three-year period. Tom Fletcher, the UN's undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, described this not as accidental escalation but as the collapse of protection.
The WCK convoy strike
Andrés writes that this collapse directly led to airstrikes on aid workers in Gaza, including the killing of seven WCK team members by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in April 2024, despite the convoy's full coordination with the military. The IDF at the time called the strike a "grave mistake" and a breach of its own procedures, dismissing reserve colonel Nochi Mendel, who had ordered it.
However, last month the IDF's military prosecutor decided not to open a criminal investigation into the strike. Andrés notes that a Guardian investigation found the convoy had been targeted under a tactic of "guilt by association," allowing lethal force to be triggered by suspicion rather than evidence.
Andrés recalls that the fourth Geneva convention emerged from the horrors of the second world war, drafted in part by Georges Cahen-Salvador, whose family narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz. He argues that the humanitarian values distinguishing responsible states from rogue actors are now under serious strain, in both Russia's and Israel's conduct.
