World Central Kitchen Will Return to Gaza (2024)

World Central Kitchen plans to resume working in Gaza.

“We are restarting our operation with the same energy, dignity, and focus on feeding as many people as possible,” she said.

The aid group said it had distributed more than 43 million meals in Gaza so far and that it had trucks carrying the equivalent of nearly eight million meals waiting to enter the enclave through the Rafah crossing in the south. World Central Kitchen said it was also planning to send trucks to Gaza through Jordan and that it would open a kitchen in Al-Mawasi, a small seaside village that the Israeli military designated as a “humanitarian zone” safe for civilians, though attacks there have continued.

Six of the seven workers killed on April 1 were from Western nations — three from Britain, one from Australia, one from Poland and one with dual citizenship of the United States and Canada. The seventh was Palestinian. They were killed in back-to-back Israeli drone strikes on their vehicles as they traveled toward Rafah after unloading food aid that had arrived by sea.

The attack prompted World Central Kitchen to immediately suspend its operations in Gaza and elicited outrage from some of Israel’s closest allies.

The World Central Kitchen convoy’s movements had been coordinated in advance with the Israeli military, but some officers had not reviewed the coordination documentation detailing which cars were part of the convoy, the military said.

Some 200 aid workers, most of them Palestinians, were killed in Gaza between Oct. 7 and the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy, according to the United Nations. A New York Times visual investigation showed that, well before the World Central Kitchen attack, six aid groups in Gaza had come under Israeli fire despite sharing their locations with the Israeli military.

The episode forced World Central Kitchen to decide between ending its efforts in Gaza or continuing, “knowing that aid, aid workers and civilians are being intimidated and killed,” Ms. Gore said in the statement.

“Ultimately, we decided that we must keep feeding, continuing our mission of showing up to provide food to people during the toughest of times,” she said.

At a memorial in Washington for the World Central Kitchen workers on Thursday, the group’s founder, the celebrity chef José Andrés, said that there were “many unanswered questions about what happened and why,” and that the aid group was still demanding an independent investigation into the Israeli military’s actions.

The seven aid workers had “risked everything to feed people they did not know and will never meet,” Mr. Andrés said. “They were the best of humanity.”

Biden and Netanyahu discussed a possible cease-fire and hostage deal in a call.

“That’s going to be right at the top of the list for Secretary Blinken, to keep pushing for this temporary cease-fire,” John F. Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, said on “This Week” on ABC. “We want it to last for about six weeks. It will allow for all those hostages to get out and, of course, to allow for easier aid access to places in Gaza, particularly up in the north.”

He has also been leading discussions about what comes after the war is over. During his stop in Saudi Arabia, according to a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Mr. Blinken expects to meet with Arab and European officials in a group to talk about plans for rebuilding Gaza, even though Israel is still carrying out its war there and has not achieved its elusive — and perhaps impossible — goal of fully eradicating Hamas.

An administration official said that about three-quarters of Mr. Biden’s nearly hourlong call to Mr. Netanyahu focused on the possible cease-fire and hostages deal. American officials have said that Israel has accepted the U.S.-drafted plan, and they have placed blame for the failure to reach an agreement squarely on Hamas, which in their description has not been constructive. During the call, the president agreed that the onus remained on Hamas to accept the latest proposal, the official said.

The two leaders also discussed hostage videos released by Hamas last week, including those showing two hostages with American citizenship. American officials have been puzzling over why Hamas would release those videos more than six months after seizing the hostages, although it is possible the goal was to increase Israeli public pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to make more concessions to reach a deal so that he could bring hostages home.

The president’s call to Mr. Netanyahu came three weeks after Mr. Biden told the prime minister that he would rethink his support for Israel’s war unless the country did more to facilitate the delivery of food and other supplies to Gaza and to limit civilian casualties. Since then, humanitarian aid to Gaza has increased substantially, and Biden advisers credit Israel with responding to the president’s demands, although they acknowledge that more is still needed.

Israel has withdrawn some of its forces from southern Gaza but says it is still planning a major assault on Rafah, where about one million Palestinians have taken refuge. Biden administration officials have expressed concerns about the possible operation, and Israeli officials have said they will take that feedback into consideration and consult further with American counterparts

In a statement after the call, the White House said that Mr. Biden “reiterated his clear position” on any Rafah operation and reviewed with the prime minister the “ongoing talks to secure the release of hostages together with an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.”

“The president and the prime minister also discussed increases in the delivery of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, including through preparations to open new northern crossings starting this week,” the statement said. “The president stressed the need for this progress to be sustained and enhanced in full coordination with humanitarian organizations.”

With protests rocking American college campuses, some critics of the Netanyahu government emphasized on Sunday that the changes it has made since Mr. Biden’s threat had not gone nearly far enough.

“Right now, what Netanyahu’s right-wing, extremist and racist government is doing is unprecedented in the modern history of warfare,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “They have killed in the last six and a half months 33,000 Palestinians, wounded 77,000, two-thirds of whom are women and children.”

The White House statement made just passing reference to the recent clash between Israel and Iran, saying only that Mr. Biden “reaffirmed his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security following the successful defense against Iran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack earlier this month.”

Israeli and U.S. forces, with the help of European and Arab allies, shot down nearly all of more than 300 missiles and drones fired by Iran at Israel earlier this month in retaliation for Israel’s killing of senior Iranian officers. Israel, heeding pleas by Mr. Biden for restraint, fired back only a token counterattack, and both sides have indicated they want to avoid further escalation.

With the immediate threat of a wider war seemingly fading, Mr. Biden and his team could shift their attention back to Gaza. Under the U.S.-sponsored cease-fire proposal, Israel would halt hostilities for six weeks and release hundreds of Palestinians held in its prisons in exchange for the release of 40 hostages held by Hamas, mainly women, older men and those with health conditions. Later stages of the deal would then extend the cease-fire and result in more hostages being freed.

American officials have said that an agreement has been blocked by Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader living in hiding in Gaza. Israel put a new counterproposal on the table on Friday, raising the prospect of a more sustained end to hostilities. Hamas, which has demanded a permanent end to the war as part of any deal, said on Saturday that it had received the proposal and was considering it.

Mr. Kirby expressed cautious optimism that progress was still possible.

“Hamas has not fully rejected it. They are considering this proposal on the table,” he said. “If we can get that in place, then that gives you six weeks of peace. It gives you no fighting for six weeks, and that includes no fighting in Rafah, and what we’re hoping is that after six weeks of a temporary cease-fire, we can maybe get something more enduring in place.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s plane.

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In northern Israel, the threat from Hezbollah drives a hospital underground.

Nearly all of the hospital’s staff members and patients have gone underground.

Getting to the hospital’s nerve center these days involves navigating past 15-foot concrete barricades and multiple blast doors, then descending several floors into a labyrinthine subterranean complex.

That is where thousands of patients and hospital workers have been for the past six months as strikes have intensified between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, just six miles to the north.

The underground operation at Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya is one of the most striking examples of how life in northern Israel has been upended since Hezbollah began launching near-daily attacks against the Israeli military in October in solidarity with Hamas, the Iranian-backed group that led the attack on southern Israel that month.

The cross-border fire has prompted tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate towns, villages and schools and forced factories and businesses to close. On the Lebanon side of the border, tens of thousands more have fled their homes.

The hospital had been preparing for such a scenario for years, given its proximity to one of the region’s most volatile borders.

“We knew this moment would arrive, we just didn’t know when,” Dr. Masad Barhoum, the hospital’s director general, said in an interview last week.

Hours after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, Galilee Medical Center staff members feared that Hezbollah might mount a similar assault. Even before the government issued evacuation orders, hospital executives decided to relocate most of the vast complex to an underground backup annex. They reduced the 775-bed hospital to 30 percent capacity in case it needed to suddenly accommodate waves of new trauma patients.

“It’s our duty to protect the people here,” Dr. Barhoum said. “This is what I’ve been preparing for my whole life.”

The hospital’s towering internal medicine ward now stands empty, its wide, neon-lit hallways wrapped in silence. In the ward’s current location below ground, the whirs of hospital machinery mingle with the beeps of golf carts carrying supplies through narrow tunnels that open into the hospital’s parking lot, offering the only hint of sunlight.

Patients lie in beds separated by mobile curtain racks in a maze of halls. Visitors sit on plastic chairs in a makeshift waiting room, since the space is too crowded to allow everyone to pay a bedside visit. Tubes and wires running across the ceiling give the space the feeling of an engine room.

In the neonatal intensive care unit, new parents in protective gowns huddle to bottle-feed their baby in a dimly lit room. Doctors perform a procedure on another tiny patient a few feet away.

The neonatal unit was the first to move below ground on Oct. 7, said Dr. Vered Fleisher Sheffer, the unit’s director.

“While everyone feels safer here,” she said, “it’s challenging because we are humans, and now we must stay underground.”

Her unit also went underground in 2006, during Israel’s last all-out war with Hezbollah: Dr. Fleisher Sheffer recalls commuting to the hospital along barren roads as air-raid sirens blared. A rocket hit the ophthalmology ward one day, but the patients had already been moved, hospital officials said.

That war lasted just over a month, and the threat from Hezbollah was felt less in the years that followed. Oct. 7 changed that.

The day before New York Times journalists visited the hospital, a Hezbollah strike hit a nearby Bedouin village, injuring 17 soldiers and two civilians. The injured were brought to the hospital’s I.C.U., where one of the soldiers died on Sunday.

“These are our neighbors,” Dr. Fleisher Sheffer said, referring to the Hezbollah militants. “It’s not like they are going anywhere, and neither are we.”

Israel faces a stark dilemma as it weighs whether to invade Rafah.

Israel Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, made the equation clear this weekend.

“If there will be a deal, we will suspend the operation” in Rafah, he told Israel’s Channel 12, echoing what officials had been saying privately about the planned ground invasion of the city which has alarmed Israel’s allies. Mr. Katz is a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s security cabinet, but not the smaller war cabinet overseeing the campaign in Gaza. Both groups have met in recent days to discuss the issues.

And Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, struck a similar tone on Sunday. While “entering Rafah is important for the long battle against Hamas,” he wrote on X, securing the release of the hostages “is urgent and much more important.”

The Israeli military has already started calling up reserve soldiers for a potential Rafah operation. An Israeli official said that Israel — under intense American pressure to avoid harm to the more than one million Gazans sheltering there — could start evacuating civilians by the end of the month.

But the official said that the evacuation could take weeks and that Israel was also using the threat of an imminent military maneuver to press Hamas into a hostage deal. Another Israeli official said the government was conveying the message that Israel won’t wait much longer and that if Hamas wants to put off the Rafah operation it should start releasing hostages. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

Negotiations for a hostage deal, mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, have stalled in recent weeks.

For Israel, analysts say, the Rafah calculus is complicated.

“Without going into Rafah, it seems like nothing has been accomplished,” said Nachman Shai, a former Israeli government minister and military spokesman.

After six months of war, Hamas’s leadership is still mostly intact, he noted, even if the majority of its battalions have been dismantled or degraded.

“But if Israel goes into Rafah, it can work either way,” Mr. Shai said. A military operation could pressure the Hamas leaders believed to be hiding there into releasing hostages still held in the enclave. Alternatively, it could cause them to call off any prospective deal, he said.

Egypt — which is particularly concerned about a potential Israeli invasion of Rafah, since the city borders its territory — has been consulting with Israel and is pushing a proposal for a two-phase hostage deal, one of the Israeli officials, who was familiar with the details of the talks, said on Sunday.

That proposal, according to the Israeli official, involves an initial “humanitarian” deal for Hamas to release the most vulnerable hostages — women, children, the physically and mentally ill and the elderly — in return for a temporary cease-fire and the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

After that initial phase, the official said, negotiations could begin for a second phase that would see all the remaining hostages returned in exchange for an end of the war. Between the two phases, the official said, there would be an interregnum, the timing and purpose of which would be left vague.

That would allow Israel’s leaders to keep the option of a Rafah operation open, satisfying hard-liners in Mr. Netanyahu’s government and the portion of the Israeli public that wants to see Hamas defeated before the war is declared over. Hamas, in turn, could view the interim period as a time to rally international guarantees for the end of the war.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas, Qatar or Egypt about the details of the proposal.

But Hamas and the Qatari mediators, for their part, appear to be increasingly trying to engage the Israeli public directly, perhaps to increase popular pressure on the government for a deal.

In recent days, Hamas released two propaganda videos featuring three of the hostages. And in rare interviews this weekend with two Israeli news media outlets, Haaretz and Kan, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry blamed both Israel and Hamas for the months of deadlock in hostage talks.

“We were hoping to see much more flexibility,” the spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, told Haaretz, “much more seriousness, much more commitment on both sides, all through the process, from day one.”

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France’s foreign minister is in Lebanon to discuss tensions between Hezbollah and Israel.

The hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah were again on display on Sunday, with the Israeli military saying it had conducted several raids against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. In the previous day, it said, Hezbollah had launched “numerous” missiles across the border into Israel.

Israel and Hezbollah — an ally of Hamas in Gaza — have engaged in near-daily cross-border strikes since the deadly Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. The clashes have displaced more than 150,000 people from their homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.

The United States and others have engaged in diplomatic efforts to reduce the tensions. France has outlined a plan that calls for Hezbollah to move its positions 10 kilometers (about six miles) farther into Lebanon and Israel to stop striking Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah has said that it will not enter into serious discussions until Israel agrees to a cease-fire.

This month, President Emmanuel Macron of France discussed his country’s proposal with Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, and its military chief, Gen. Joseph Aoun, in Paris. And over the weekend, the French foreign minister, Mr. Séjourné, took the diplomatic push to Beirut, Lebanon’s capital.

In Beirut on Sunday, Mr. Séjourné met with Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker, and was due to hold talks later in the day with Mr. Mikati and General Aoun.

After he wraps up his visit to Lebanon, Mr. Séjourné will travel to Saudi Arabia to join diplomats working to broker an agreement between Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages held in the enclave. He is also expected to visit Israel in the coming days, according to France’s Foreign Ministry.

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

A ship carrying 400 tons of aid for Gaza has docked in Israel’s port of Ashdod.

Sean Carroll, the president of Anera, said that far more aid is needed in Gaza.

“This is, hopefully, the first of many ship- and truckloads of thousands of tons of aid to come,” Mr. Carroll said in the statement. “We will bring as much of this as possible to the north, where many are at severe risk of death by starvation.”

Gaza has been gripped by a severe hunger crisis that experts describe as human-made, the result of the Israeli bombardment and restrictions that have made delivering humanitarian assistance to Gaza a major challenge.

For the first few weeks of the war, Israel maintained a near-total blockade of the territory that barred food and medicine from entering. It also destroyed Gaza’s port, restricted fishing and bombed many of the territory’s farms.

Israel eventually loosened its blockade but instituted a meticulous inspection process that it has said is necessary to ensure that supplies do not fall into the hands of Hamas. Aid groups have said the inspections create bottlenecks.

In recent weeks, under pressure from the Biden administration after the Israeli killing of seven international aid workers from World Central Kitchen, Israel has been keen to show that it is allowing more aid to enter.

Israel’s efforts — which include opening new aid routes — have been acknowledged in the last week by the Biden administration and international aid officials. More aid trucks appear to be reaching Gaza, particularly the north of the enclave, which experts warn is at particular risk of famine.

While the increased levels of aid are a good sign, it is too early to say whether famine has been averted, said Arif Husain, the chief economist at the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. Earlier this month, Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in congressional testimony that she believed a famine was underway in parts of northern Gaza.

Anera has served more than 24 million meals in the Gaza Strip since the war began, according to the statement issued on Sunday.

The Emirates has also taken on a significant role in providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Since the war began, it has delivered more than 31,000 tons of humanitarian supplies, including food and medicine, via flights, airdrops, trucks and ships, the statement said.

“There remains a critical need — today more than ever — to deliver lifesaving humanitarian relief to the Gaza Strip,” Reem Al Hashimy, the Emirati minister for international cooperation, said in the statement.

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Thousands rallied in Tel Aviv in support of hostages.

Weekly rallies and demonstrations have been held in the city for months to pressure the government to make a deal for the return of hostages, often growing in size and converging with antigovernment protests as the war in Gaza has persisted.

The demonstration on Saturday occurred hours after Hamas released a video of two hostages and amid renewed efforts to break a deadlock in cease-fire negotiations.

Relatives of the captives and their supporters held posters of the hostages, lit flares and waved Israeli flags. The Israeli police said that the protest was largely peaceful but that seven people had been arrested.

Israeli officials believe that the I.C.C. is preparing arrest warrants over the war.

The Israeli officials, who are worried about the potential fallout from such a case, said they believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is among those who might be named in a warrant. It is not clear who might be charged from Hamas or what crimes would be cited.

The Israeli officials did not disclose the nature of the information that led them to be concerned about potential I.C.C. action, and the court did not comment on the matter.

Arrest warrants from the court would probably be seen in much of the world as a humbling moral rebuke, particularly to Israel, which for months has faced international backlash over its conduct in Gaza, including from President Biden, who called it “over the top.”

It could also affect Israel’s policies as the country presses its military campaign against Hamas. One of the Israeli officials said that the possibility of the court issuing arrest warrants had informed Israeli decision-making in recent weeks.

The Israeli and foreign officials said they didn’t know what stage the process was in. Any warrants would require approval from a panel of judges and would not necessarily result in a trial or even the targets’ immediate arrest.

Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, has previously confirmed that his team is investigating incidents during the war, but his office declined to comment for this article, saying that it does not “respond to speculation in media reports.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s office also would not comment, but on Friday the prime minister said on social media that any intervention by the I.C.C. “would set a dangerous precedent that threatens the soldiers and officials of all democracies fighting savage terrorism and wanton aggression.”

Mr. Netanyahu did not explain what prompted his statement, though he may have been responding to speculation about the arrest warrants in the Israeli press.

He also said: “Under my leadership, Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.”

Based in The Hague, the I.C.C. is the world’s only permanent international court with the power to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. The court has no police force of its own. Instead, it relies on its 124 members, which include most European countries but not Israel or the United States, to arrest those named in warrants. It cannot try defendants in absentia.

But warrants from the court can pose obstacles to travel for officials named in them.

The Hamas-led raid last October led to the killing of roughly 1,200 people in Israel and the abductions of some 250 others, according to Israeli officials. The subsequent war in Gaza, including heavy Israeli bombardment, has killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gazan officials, caused widespread damage to housing and infrastructure, and brought the territory to the brink of famine.

The Israeli assault in Gaza has led the International Court of Justice, a separate court in The Hague, to hear accusations of genocide against the Israeli state and has spurred a wave of protests on college campuses in the United States.

If the I.C.C. does issue arrest warrants, they would come with deep stigmatization, placing those named in them in the same category as foreign leaders like Omar al-Bashir, the deposed president of Sudan, and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, who was the subject of a warrant last year tied to his war against Ukraine.

The I.C.C.’s focus on individuals rather than states differentiates it from the International Court of Justice, which settles disputes between states.

The I.C.C. judges have ruled that the court has jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank because the Palestinians have joined the court as the State of Palestine.

Mr. Khan has said that his team will be investigating incidents that have occurred since Oct. 7 and that he will be “impartially looking at the evidence and vindicating the rights of victims whether they are in Israel or Palestine.”

Mr. Khan’s office has also been investigating allegations of war crimes committed during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas; one of the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity believes the new arrest warrants would be an extension of that investigation.

Hamas and the Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment. The office of Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, declined to comment.

In general, Israeli officials say that they fight according to the laws of war and that they take significant steps to protect civilians, accusing Hamas of hiding inside civilian areas and forcing Israel to pursue them there. Hamas has denied committing atrocities on Oct. 7, saying — despite video evidence to the contrary — that its fighters tried to avoid harming civilians.

Marlise Simons, Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.