On Wednesday, the Jennifer, the cargo ship of the non-governmental organization World Central Kitchen (WCK) which was supposed to deliver 400 tons of food to the Gaza Strip, returned, almost full, to Cyprus. The ship left the Cypriot port of Larnaca on March 30 and reached the Strip on April 1: it should have waited for the food to be gradually unloaded and distributed by the NGO workers before leaving, but it stopped all operations after killing of seven of them on April 2. WCK is the organization that has distributed the most humanitarian aid in the Strip in the last six months after the United Nations.
According to initial reconstructions, the seven operators were killed by the Israeli army in the city of Deir al Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip: the convoy was leaving the city after unloading more than 100 tons of food aid in a warehouse in the area . Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that the attack was carried out by his own army but said it was not “intentional”.
According to anonymous sources in the Israeli army spoken to by the newspaper Haaretz, the attack would have targeted a Hamas militiaman who would have been on board a truck in the convoy which also included three cars in which the seven killed operators were located. The attack would have been carried out after the truck had moved away from the convoy: the alleged Hamas militiaman would not have been in any of the three cars when they were hit, one after the other, by three missiles launched by an Israeli drone, according to as reported to Haaretz.
WCK is based in the United States, mainly concerned with providing food assistance in places affected by natural disasters, and was founded by the well-known Spanish-American chef José Andrés. Among other things, it provided food delivered by ships of the humanitarian aid “maritime corridor” to the Gaza Strip. The journalist of Associated Press Ashraf Khalil he wrote that the interruption of their work will almost certainly aggravate what various experts define as “an imminent famine”, given that “a flow of aid that was crucial, desperately needed in an area under military siege has been interrupted”.
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