Middle East Timeline

WCK teams position to provide meals to families affected by the escalated violence in the Middle East, including Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon.

WCK teams begin feeding vulnerable populations in Israel, including families evacuating their homes in border towns. WCK partners with restaurants and caterers to provide 12,000 daily meals, while also building relationships with local aid groups helping civilians. We continue to increase meal capacities as we reach new populations including home-bound seniors, immigrant communities, and members of the agricultural sector whose farmland has been damaged by rocket fire.

WCK begins providing meals in Tyre, Lebanon in partnership with local NGOs. Most of the meals are delivered to schools where they can be picked up by displaced families in need of aid. We keep in close contact with Chef Corps member Aline Kamakian, who is monitoring food needs on the ground as the number of Palestinian refugees increases. We first met Aline after the 2020 blast in Beirut when she stepped up to feed her neighbors in need.

Rapid intensification exacerbates the humanitarian crisis. In just over two weeks, our partner, Anera provides more than 1.4 million meals in Gaza—both cooked meals and kits of produce and dry goods that can sustain a family for several days. Together, we are able to reach Palestinians in and around Gaza City and further south in Khan Younis.

Working out of our regional headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, our team diligently prepares to send aid into Gaza once allowed.

Gaza’s borders have been closed for nearly a month—19 WCK trucks loaded with food and water wait at the Egypt-Gaza border for permission to enter. In total, the WCK trucks carry the equivalent of more than 314,000 meals.

The first WCK aid trucks enter Gaza and the supplies they carry are distributed by Anera to Palestinians in need. Through the first WCK convoys, we provide enough canned goods and ingredients, including vegetables and flour, to prepare tens of thousands of meals.

WCK also works with the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) to scale up our food kit distribution efforts.

In Cairo, WCK’s team works out of a 54,000-square-foot warehouse where we pack humanitarian supplies into trucks for the long and complex 220 mile journey to Gaza. By mid December, we dispatched more than 380 trucks.

WCK, alongside our partners, provides more than 11.5 million meals in the region in the form of freshly prepared hot meals and food kits. Ten weeks after serving our first plates of food, we have overcome immense challenges to begin cooking from WCK’s first Field Kitchen in Gaza. Teams prepare tens of thousands of meals daily throughout Gaza utilizing our specially designed stoves fueled by wood pellets.

The population of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, has swelled from 250,000 people to well over a million. In order to get families the support they need, our teams provide meals at camps, hospitals, and schools that have become shelters. We also coordinate with UNRWA and Anera to provide meal kits at the Egyptian border and in Khan Younis.

Getting aid into Gaza has been a complex logistical challenge, but the WCK team in Egypt is undeterred. WCK procurement and logistics teams in Cairo create designs for multiple truck packing systems to be sure each truck we dispatch is loaded for maximum efficiency. This careful packing ensures that each community kitchen receives the ingredients and equipment needed to start cooking for 1,845 people daily.

WCK staff on the ground in Gaza help get community kitchens operational as quickly as possible by training local Palestinians. Nine of these kitchens are up and running with seven more soon to cook their first meals.

WCK participates in an airdrop of humanitarian aid bound for a Jordanian field hospital in hard-to-reach northern Gaza. José Andrés, WCK’s founder, joins the Jordanian Royal Air Force and the Royal Netherlands Air Force as part of the international effort to complete the first delivery of this kind.

WCK also runs convoys of food to the northern Gaza, but our teams are only able to get there a limited number of times each week. The convoy deliveries include three-to-four day meal boxes that are dense in calories and contain variety.

While our efforts center around our Relief Kitchen in Rafah, we also support the establishment of more than 60 community kitchens spread across Rafah, Khan Younis, and Deir al-Balah. Nearly 400 Palestinians work in these community kitchens, making more than 170,000 hot meals every day. Their creativity and determination are helping to scale up our efforts allowing WCK to reach more families in need.

As the sacred month of Ramadan approaches, WCK teams work to prepare for the distribution of 92,000 Ramadan food boxes, the equivalent of 4.7 million meals.

In our Rafah Field Kitchen, there are now dozens of water tanks, carefully arranged hoses, and constantly whirring filtration systems. These new installations are producing the water our kitchen relies on to cook, making sure it is clean and safe to use. The WCK Rafah Field Kitchen has enough purified water to safely produce at least 50,000 meals every day.

WCK mobilizes in Cyprus to join efforts to open a maritime route to ship desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. We work with the United Arab Emirates, NGO partner Open Arms, and the international community to establish the route.

WCK opens a Welcome Center for displaced Palestinians from northern Gaza who are fleeing by foot in search of safety further south. People crossing the Israeli military checkpoint in the city of Deir al-Balah are greeted by WCK’s team with hot meals and food kits. We partner with local organizations to provide a range of services, such as medical care, to ensure families at the Welcome Center get the urgent support they require.

A few blocks away from the Welcome Center in Deir al-Balah, WCK staff work to get a second full-scale Field Kitchen built and operational.

WCK participates in another airdrop of humanitarian aid into northern Gaza. In partnership with the Royal Jordanian Air Force, we provide 52,700 meals, totaling 15 tons of aid, to Palestinian families.

After dispatching our first maritime shipment of humanitarian aid to Gaza on March 12, the Open Arms vessel reaches Gaza on March 15 as part of Operation Safeena. This historic first humanitarian shipment to reach the coast of Gaza in nearly two decades contains almost 200 tons of food. With our partners in Gaza, we construct a jetty to offload the aid into trucks to deliver food to Palestinians in need.

On April 1, Israeli airstrikes hit a WCK convoy in Gaza, killing seven of our team members. Zomi, Damian, Saif, Jim, James, John, and Jacob. WCK pauses relief efforts in the region. Read about their incredible lives on the Honoring Our Heroes page.

Prior to this pause, WCK—alongside local and international partners—served more than 42 million meals by land, air, and sea to Palestinians in Gaza. This includes the dispatch of 1,700 trucks, participation airdrops, the establishment of a network of kitchens, and the opening of the maritime aid route through Operation Safeena.

Palestinian-led teams resume work in Gaza and WCK works around the clock to get as much food through the border as possible. Hundreds of thousands of fresh meals and bread are being prepared in our field kitchens and through our network of community kitchens.

WCK opens a third Field Kitchen in Al-Mawasi named Damian’s Kitchen in honor of one of the seven team members killed by the IDF strike on April 1.

Evacuation orders issued for parts of Rafah force our main Field Kitchen and many of our nearby community kitchens to pause operations. As Israeli forces move further into the city and attacks intensify, delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza is severely restricted, forcing our teams to rely on ingredients and supplies stored in our warehouses.

In the nearly eight months since WCK served our first plates of food in Gaza, our teams have provided more than 50 million meals by land, air, and sea to Palestinian families in need. Despite unprecedented challenges, our teams continue working to provide lifesaving food for people facing unimaginable hardship.

Many of the community kitchens forced to pause operations due to evacuation orders in Rafah are relocated. Aid convoys of 100 trucks a week from Cairo begin reaching WCK teams, allowing our field kitchens in Deir al-Balah and Al-Mawasi to scale-up operations as the Rafah kitchen remains closed. Additionally, a new WCK aid route from Jordan is open. In total, WCK is distributing about 250,000 meals daily in Gaza.

WCK’s Deir al-Balah Field Kitchen surpasses the 1 million meal mark. The excitement over the milestone fuels our entire team to continue scaling up as rapidly as possible as UN experts warn of widespread famine in Gaza.

WCK starts providing meals and food kits to three communities on Israel’s most northern border with Lebanon who have suffered from significant shelling and rockets. There are a small number of elderly people and residents who could not evacuate who have few consistent food options.

WCK’s fourth Field Kitchen—Zomi’s Kitchen—opens in Khan Younis in central Gaza. Located at the site of a former waterpark, the flat poolside spaces where families once watched their children playing are now filled with WCK’s pellet stoves cooking thousands of meals daily. The almost entirely women-led and women-operated kitchen is named after Zomi, one of the seven team members killed by the IDF strike on April 1.

To reach areas of northern Gaza that have been almost entirely cut off from food aid, WCK teams organize 15 trucks of food from the Kingdom of Jordan to deliver across the northern border through Zikim. Our partner, Juzoor, takes the supplies into their warehouse in northern Gaza and distributes them. We also partner with Anera on food deliveries to Gaza City in the north, including 3,000 boxes containing the equivalent of over 120,000 ready-to-eat meals.

WCK teams in Lebanon mark one million meals served since November. We are working alongside Chef Aline, who is ensuring meals from our restaurant partners reach impacted communities along the southern border with Israel.

As supply chains at the border slow once again, WCK teams in Gaza ramp up their efforts to purchase vegetables like eggplant and okra from local farmers who are still able to harvest despite widespread devastation. By supporting these farmers around Deir al-Balah, we provide a source of income to people who would otherwise lose their jobs and ensure that Palestinian families receive nourishing meals cooked with fresh produce.

The ground offensive in Gaza becomes so intense that evacuation orders and nearby fighting force our teams to pause work at Zomi’s Kitchen. Eleven Community Kitchens also temporarily close due to the latest offensive and another eight kitchens aren’t able to resupply. Our other large-capacity field kitchens in Deir al-Balah and Mawasi remain operational and take over critical hospital deliveries that Zomi’s Kitchen was supporting. Despite some of the most daunting challenges to date, WCK teams have been able to provide 60 million meals to Palestinian families even as safe areas continue to shrink.

One of our Palestinian colleagues, Nadi, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on August 7 near Deir al-Balah, Gaza. He was an integral member of our WCK team from the early days of our response and a humanitarian at his very core. At age 37, Nadi was a husband and a father of four young children.

Two shipments of WCK-provided aid arrive in northern Gaza with enough food to prepare more than 410,000 meals. The pallets of canned foods and dry goods are delivered to our local partners.

At the same time, WCK is supporting Palestinians in the south of Gaza. WCK distributed food kits to displacement camps in southern Gaza in partnership with the Sunbirds, a Palestine-based para-cycling team. This group of resilient cyclists wanted to compete in the 2024 Paralympics, but they are now determined to support their communities.

Fighting in central Gaza forces WCK’s Deir al-Balah Field Kitchen and several Community Kitchens to halt operations. With Zomi’s Kitchen still closed, the team at our Al-Mawasi kitchen works tirelessly to increase production to meet the needs of Palestinians who rely on meals from the kitchens forced to pause work.

Cooking at Zomi’s Kitchen resumes after being closed for a month due to active conflict and evacuation orders in the area. The team can produce 11,800 daily meals for local residents and displaced families living in camps surrounding Khan Younis.

After polio was found in wastewater in Gaza due to the worsening sanitation crisis, an effort to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children begins. WCK teams provide meals to members of other NGOs providing vaccinations.

With three field kitchens being fully operational for 10 consecutive days and more than 80 community kitchens up and running, WCK has been able to increase its daily hot meal production capacity by 60,000. The main focus is on further increasing capacity at Damian’s Kitchen, located in the most densely populated area of displaced families seeking food assistance.

WCK rapidly ramps up its meal production in Lebanon to address the escalating humanitarian crisis and mounting civilian casualties as Israel targets Hezbollah in Lebanon, widening the war in the region. We allocate further resources and new team members to help Chef Aline’s team reach 50,000 daily meals to meet the growing need for aid as families flee their homes.