World Central Kitchen draws criticism for its neutrality in Gaza

“We knew what World Central Kitchen was designed to do, which is to feed people in their time of need,” said Nate Mook, who was WCK’s chief executive for nearly five years. “But that didn’t mean that we couldn’t take a stance on things. ... We were going to be honest about the situation people were in and what was happening.”

But when it entered war zones, first in Ukraine and later in Gaza, WCK found itself in unfamiliar territory for a nonprofit founded and fronted by José Andrés, the expansive chef and humanitarian known for his unblinking opinions, such as when he said that President Donald Trump had “a lot of blame to take” for the widespread deaths in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017.

When providing relief in any disaster zone, particularly during war, international aid groups, whether the United Nations’ World Food Program, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or smaller nonprofits, are expected to adhere to the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence, as codified in international humanitarian law. “Remaining neutral has proven time and again that it allows us to maintain access to people in need,” Gilles Carbonnier, ICRC vice president, said in a keynote address last year.

WCK and Andrés’s history of speaking frankly, even as it activated in Ukraine, put the nonprofit in a sometimes awkward position when it started working in Gaza. As an organization, WCK generally struck a neutral tone as Israel launched a military campaign in the enclave following Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack, while Andrés occasionally posted something more political on his personal social media platforms. The organization’s stance frustrated some WCK staff members and contractors — as well as Palestinian Americans recruited for the group’s chef corps to assist with relief efforts.

In a December letter sent to WCK’s leadership team, more than 40 employees, contractors and volunteer chefs pressed the organization to call for a permanent cease-fire, among other actions, as it became clear that Israel’s war in Gaza was leading to starvation, population displacement, disease, wholesale destruction of infrastructure and thousands of deaths, many of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Reem Assil, the chef and founder of Reem’s, a two-store Arab street food chain in San Francisco, quit WCK’s chef corps this year, frustrated by the organization’s apparent unwillingness to condemn what she views as a genocide. She says the moral clarity WCK and Andrés exhibited in Ukraine, symbolically siding with Ukrainians as part of their fight against Russia, all but evaporated in Gaza.

“It would be different if they were apolitical about everything, but they’ve taken strong stances,” Assil told The Washington Post. Assil, who is Palestinian on her mother’s side, says she has lost more than 40 extended family members since Israel began its military campaign in October.

WCK and Andrés declined on-the-record interviews for this story. But the organization sent a statement that focused on its work in Gaza under “some of the most challenging conditions the world has ever known,” conditions that led to the deaths of seven WCK workers on April 1 and to more pointed commentary from WCK and its founder. The group says it has activated more than 60 community kitchens, operated by thousands of Palestinian staff and volunteers who have served 47 million meals to date. WCK, the statement added, has also prepared nearly 2 million meals for Israelis displaced by “rocket fire and terrorist attacks.”

“Some people might want us to choose sides in this conflict,” the statement said. “World Central Kitchen is on the side of feeding people. We don’t ask what religion or nationality you are. We just ask how many meals you need.”

Since its days in Puerto Rico, WCK has a reputation for playing by its own rules, quick to rethink disaster relief models and cut through red tape that can slow food delivery. The organization and its leader have historically not shied from taking positions, either. In December 2022, Andrés posted a selfie with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and called him and the people of Ukraine “heroes.” The group called its restaurant partners in Ukraine “food fighters.” During an Axios summit in April 2022, Andrés said that Russia was using food as a weapon.

In October, Andrés appeared to throw his support behind Israel when he called out Ione Belarra, then a Spanish minister, who said online that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was “carrying out war crimes in the Gaza Strip.” Andrés reposted Belarra’s comment and suggested people first needed to recognize Hamas’s attack as an act of terrorism before they “can ask for restraint and respect for the lives of civilians in Gaza.” (The chef made a similar statement to NPR in December.) Andrés then recommended Belarra be removed from her post, which she would hold on to until a new coalition government was formed in November.

As the weeks went by in Gaza — and the death toll and hunger rose — WCK released no statements calling for a cease-fire, humanitarian or otherwise, even as other groups began pushing the boundaries of neutrality to release their own. Veteran humanitarian aid executives in Gaza say groups were walking a fine line in the early days of the war: They needed Israeli approval to provide relief — and one sure way to upset Israel, aid executives say, is to call for a cease-fire, which Israel views as criticism and tacit support of Hamas, a militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.

Ramsey Telhami quit his job as an assistant video editor at WCK in March because of “extensive, unexplained censorship regarding Gaza at the organization,” he wrote in an article for Mondoweiss, a site that calls itself a “critical resource for the movement for justice for Palestinians.” A Palestinian American, Telhami asserted that WCK would edit video footage to delete references to the hardships and widespread death and displacement in Gaza. He alleges that footage of a WCK kitchen hit during an Israel Defense Forces attack was never released to the public. (By contrast, WCK’s former chief executive released a video of a partner kitchen bombed in Ukraine in 2022.)

Telhami said these editorial decisions were passed along to him by Linda Roth, chief communications officer at WCK. Roth is a former supervising producer at CNN, where she was “Wolf Blitzer’s go to producer for challenging assignments,” according to her LinkedIn page. Roth declined an on-the-record interview.

“Much of the work in a genocide is not pulling the trigger, but instead minimizing and denying that a genocide is going on,” wrote Telhami, who accused WCK of normalizing a genocide in Gaza. “Genocide is a phenomenon of gradual boundary pushing.”

In December, South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing the country of violating the Genocide Convention by attempting “to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.” Israeli officials have rejected the genocide charges, saying the soaring death toll is an unavoidable consequence of battling an enemy that embeds in civilian areas. The court accepted the case, which could take years to adjudicate.

WCK wasn’t the only humanitarian aid group to feel the pressure to respond more forcefully to Palestinian suffering in Gaza. Organizations such as UNICEF and the World Food Program faced their own internal critics, who felt the groups were too timid, or too conflicted, in their responses. Still, both WFP and UNICEF have called for a humanitarian cease-fire even as their staffs have demanded more. In April, UNICEF said a cease-fire was the “only way to end the killing and injuring of children.” Since Oct. 7, more than 190 U.N. workers have been killed in Gaza.

“The bottom line is that a ceasefire is the single most important action that could reduce suffering from hunger in Gaza,” Steve Taravella, a senior spokesperson for the World Food Program, said in an email to The Post. “Aid workers need to feel safe to deliver food — not just feel safe, but be safe — and those in need must feel safe to come out to seek food.”

All nongovernmental organizations have to abide by humanitarian principles, including impartiality, said Sean Carroll, president and chief executive of Anera, a relief organization that has been working in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon for more than 55 years. “But for me, impartiality isn’t about whether you’re impartial about issues that will help a humanitarian situation,” added Carroll, whose group has called for a cease-fire multiple times.

The line is shifting on what aid organizations consider political vs. humanitarian issues, he added.

“Not because people have said, ‘Well, it’s okay to be political now,’” Carroll said. “But because they realize that calling for a cease-fire is humanitarian.”

What sharpened WCK’s tone and messaging on Gaza, people say, was the deaths of its seven workers in April. The following day, WCK released a short statement saying the workers, a mix of contractors and at least one full-time employee, were killed in a “targeted attack” by the IDF. Andrés has used his high-profile status to make more critical statements. On ABC’s “This Week,” he told Martha Raddatz that the battle in Gaza “doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel. ... At this point, it seems it’s a war against humanity itself.”

Later in the interview, Andrés told Raddatz: “I’ve seen firsthand what has been happening in Ukraine — entire towns and cities being wiped out by Russia and by [President Vladimir] Putin. What Prime Minister Netanyahu is doing is exactly the same.”

But as executives from other nonprofits explain, Andrés is freer to speak in his personal capacity than as a board member or “chief feeding officer” of World Central Kitchen. Even before the WCK workers were killed, Andrés had called for a cease-fire during a March interview with NBC. In February, the chef composed a post directly to Netanyahu on X, calling for increased security and for an “immediate ceasefire and a safe release of hostages, with no more civilian deaths on either side.”

But the line between WCK and Andrés is blurry at best, people told The Post. “In the eyes of, I think, most of the public who think about WCK, he is WCK,” said a former employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

That’s why another executive with a humanitarian group said he never makes political statements in his personal capacity. The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to publicly criticize WCK and Andrés, said it’s difficult to know how statements are interpreted. If he criticized Israel, for example, “do you think the IDF would allow me to go in there and help Israel,” if the country were bombed in the future, he asked. “Hell no.”

Some, however, would like WCK and Andrés to push harder against the boundaries of neutrality. Marcelle G Afram is a Palestinian American who, like Assil, quit WCK’s chef corps in protest over the way they say the organization has minimized Palestinian voices and perspectives during its work in Gaza. Both Afram and Assil would like to see WCK channel its resources in a way that creates self-sustaining communities in Gaza, not ones dependent on humanitarian charity. They would also like WCK and Andrés to push the Biden administration to apply more pressure on Israel to end the hostilities in Gaza.

“I think José probably needs to pick up the phone with the State Department and use his power to do a bigger thing than just feed people,” said Afram, a former Maydan chef who now hosts pop-ups, events and private dinners with his Palestinian-inspired kitchen, Shababi.

But more than that, Afram is frustrated by the framing of the argument. “It’s strange how we have decided that to say the bloodshed of humanity needs to stop is a political situation,” he said. “People want to still talk in these terms of politics, and we’re unearthing our people from mass graves.”