Let Us Cook
For 70 days, no food, fuel or medicine has been allowed into Gaza.
World Central Kitchen has been forced to stop cooking—not for lack of will, but because there is nothing left to cook. Hunger has turned from crisis to catastrophe. It’s critical that borders reopen and food aid is allowed to enter. If and when the borders open, aid must not only enter – it must be accessible and effective for Gazan families.
Recent reports indicate that Israel intends to shift humanitarian relief to food kits to be picked up from centralized hubs, and kitchens will operate only in secure areas under Israeli military control. No humanitarian mission can succeed if it puts relief workers in danger, undermines local trust, or treats starving families as security risks first and human beings second.
Our goal is to meet humanitarian needs while addressing concerns about any diversion of food or resources to terrorist organizations. We understand that Israel shares this goal. But the proposed hub approach will be ineffective and needlessly endanger the lives of humanitarians, if it is the only way to provide food aid.
A functional aid strategy must do four things:
- Avoid diversion and treat families with humanity. A hot meal delivers instant calories to hungry people and cannot be stolen. Dry food kits, on the other hand, have high market resale value and can be stored, making them attractive for profiteering.
- Protect the safety of humanitarian workers and the integrity of aid delivery. Limiting the operation of kitchens to a few centralized hubs under military control will turn those kitchens into mass congregation points and make them an obvious target for terrorist activity, endangering lives and elevating the threat of looters.
- Meet people where they are and feed as many people as possible. Preparing 300,000 hot meals per day through large, but geographically dispersed, kitchens is far more efficient than distributing food kits, which would require twice as many trucks to deliver the same number of meals as well as reliable water and power in individual homes.
- Ensure locally-appropriate aid that secures the trust of the community. By aligning aid delivery with military-controlled areas, WCK will be forced to cut off all community kitchens and will no longer be viewed as neutral and trusted by the community, which endangers our local staff. The trust of the community underpins our ability to function effectively in high-risk environments.
Food kits, while useful in specific scenarios, are not feasible or effective at the scale and urgency required in Gaza. Bulk-cooked hot meals, in distributed community locations independent of Israel Defense Forces and military contractors, remain the safest, most dignified, efficient and secure method of feeding people. World Central Kitchen has proven we can feed Palestinians at-scale safely while minimizing aid diversion – with partnership and support to access supplies, we can do this again.
