The celebrity chef who beat the US military at getting aid into Gaza
LARNACA, Cyprus—When President Biden declared in early March that the U.S. military would build a pier on the coast of Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid by sea, a Spanish-American celebrity chef was already two steps ahead of the world’s mightiest fighting force. José Andrés had commandeered a tugboat to bring 200 tons of food on a barge from Larnaca, a port city in Cyprus, to Gaza’s shores for use in kitchens run by his disaster-relief group, World Central Kitchen.
He had also flown to Tel Aviv to charm Israeli officials into supporting his initiative. When the tugboat arrived in Cyprus in mid-February, “everything went from impossible to maybe," said Andrés. Making such leaps is the signature of the chef’s philanthropy.
To reach shore after Gaza’s port was bombed, local contractors cobbled together a jetty from the rubble of destroyed buildings. The vessels began the three-day journey across the Mediterranean before the jetty was complete; if it wasn’t ready in time, the volunteer crew would have to improvise. In a war that poses unprecedented challenges for humanitarian organizations used to operating in the world’s toughest environments, Andrés’s tiny but nimble charity has repeatedly set the pace.
The group is punching above its weight in Gaza, where more than one million people are estimated to be starving as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas. While the United Nations provides nearly 80% of humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave, World Central Kitchen accounts for more than half of non-U.N. deliveries, mostly food, according to Cogat, the Israeli military body coordinating aid there.
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