Chef José Andrés Accuses Israel of Killing Aid Workers in Gaza

In an interview with Reuters that was released Wednesday, Andrés said that initially his group lost contact with its team in Gaza and that he realized what had happened only when he saw images of the aid employees’ corpses.

After Israeli forces struck the first car, the aid team tried to escape to a second car in the convoy. When that car was struck, the workers then fled to a third car, where they were killed in yet another strike.

“They were targeting us in a deconflicting zone, in an area controlled by IDF. They know that it was our teams moving on that road,” Andrés told Reuters, adding that Israel targeted the aid workers “systematically, car by car.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his government will investigate its military, though such probes are usually not completed in a timely fashion and rarely produce conclusions that bring accountability. Netanyahu, with the assistance of the U.S., has so far maintained that the killing was unintentional and that such an attack “happens in war.”

While Andrés said he welcomes the guarantee of an investigation, he would not accept Israel’s assertion that the attack was not deliberate.

“This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,” Andrés told Reuters. “This was over a 1.5, 1.8 kilometers, with a very defined humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colorful logo that we are obviously very proud of.”