--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stephen Kalin has been reporting on aid in Gaza for the Wall Street Journal. There's aid going in on the ground from Egypt, which is neighboring Gaza, but Cyprus back in November offered to help get aid into Gaza by sea.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: That's right. So they started doing airdrops, and World Central Kitchen started pushing the idea of a sea route from Cyprus. They're taking 200 tons of aid, flour, rice, pre-prepared meals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was in Cyprus right after they sent their first ship off, and they sent their second shipment this past weekend. Normally takes about 15 hours to get from Larnaca to Gaza, but in fact, it'll take about 50 hours, we think.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: That shipment was picked up by World Central Kitchen Aid workers in Gaza, the same ones who were later killed by Israeli forces.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What this mess means for Gaza, coming up on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're listening to Today Explained. We asked Stephen Kalin to tell us how Israel ended up killing seven aid workers this week.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: A lot of the details are still kind of vague and not quite confirmed. What we do know at this point is that the second sea shipment had arrived sometime around Monday afternoon, Monday evening, at the beach in Gaza where World Central Kitchen had arranged for the construction of a sort of a makeshift jetty because the port in Gaza has been put out of commission by the war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is in northern Gaza and the whole area is sort of cordoned off by the Israeli military to provide security for the aid workers to unload a few hundred tons of food.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: What happened on Monday was that the unloading began. One of the shipments was going from the beach down to Deir-e-Belah, which is a town in the center of Gaza, made a delivery to a warehouse there. And then there were three vehicles that were on their way back from the warehouse when they were struck in what appears to have been three successive strikes along the beach road.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It appears their convoy was hit multiple times, including a direct strike to an armoured car, though it was clearly marked with the group's name. It seems like it was a drone strike.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: We're still waiting on confirmation of those details, but that's what the sort of investigation so far and sort of open source reporting appears to indicate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Very sadly, there were seven World Central Kitchen staff and contractors in those vehicles, and they were all killed.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: The situation began being very obvious when we began seeing images of these bodies and these passports in the hospital that confirmed these were our people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was dark out, and so we're hearing from some Israeli former officials that there might have been some confusion.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: The Israeli military has called this a mistake without really saying much more, so we don't really know in what way it was a mistake, why, how.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unfortunately, in the last day, there was a tragic incident of an unintended strike of our forces on innocent people in the Gaza Strip.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: This happens in war. We're checking this thoroughly. or in touch with the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's, I think, more important than that, though, is that the World Central Kitchen had completed a process which aid groups call deconfliction, which is basically a process by which aid groups tell the Israeli military the location of their vehicles, offices, warehouses, distribution centers, wherever they are and wherever they're going, the route that they're taking, the time that they plan to be there.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: So they share all this sort of information. in the interest of making sure that the military knows who they are, what they're doing, and that they shouldn't be targeted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As far as we can tell, World Central Kitchen is saying this convoy was deconflicted, and the Israeli military isn't denying that.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: So the big question here is, if the Israeli military knew who was in these vehicles and expected them to be there where they were, when they were there, why this happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And unfortunately, it's not an isolated incident. This has happened repeatedly in Gaza over the past few months. seven people dead.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: But there are seven, on top of a list, of more than another 190 humanitarian workers that they've been killed over the last six months.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: World Central Kitchen has called it a targeted strike, indicating that they felt singled out.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: But what I know is that we were targeted deliberately, nonstop, until everybody was dead in this convoy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That cannot be the role of an army. That cannot be the role of an army that has hundreds of drones above Gaza in any single moment.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: And from speaking to other aid groups over the past few months and Palestinians who live in Gaza, there is a sense that there is no safe place. There's no safe activity. There's no way to really protect yourself in Gaza right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For those people and their perspective, everything is a target.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: Can you tell us a bit more about this group, World Central Kitchen, for people who aren't familiar?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it's a small NGO. It was set up in 2010 after the earthquake in Haiti by a chef named Jose Andres who is Spanish.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: He got two Michelin stars. He's a pretty famous celebrity chef. He's got cookbooks. He's on TV all the time. He was on the late shows just a week or two ago to promote a new cookbook.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In honor of Top Chef being in Wisconsin, what U.S. state do you think has the best food?
--:-- Stephen Kalin: Without a doubt, the first 51st state. This is Washington, D.C. We deserve to become an estate. We pay taxes and we have no representation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of his most famous restaurants are in Washington, D.C., actually, where he lives and the NGO is based.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: So he's got a lot of connections, celebrities and politicians. And he basically set this up in response to that earthquake in Haiti.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Haiti is the moment that they said, you know, I'm not going to stand watching on TV thinking about what we can do. I'm going to show up and I'm going to start learning how cooks like me, if we come together, with volunteers, we can start feeding anybody.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: Basically, what World Central Kitchen does is go into emergency situations. They go and set up kitchens. They try to work with the community. They hire people and recruit volunteers from the community. And they make as much food and distribute it to people who need it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when the war started in Gaza, actually World Central Kitchen went early on to Israel to feed people, Israelis who were displaced from their homes by the Hamas attack on October 7th.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: And then they also went into Gaza, started small, but have scaled up. And over the past six months, they've become one of the most important food providers in Gaza, which is there's over a million people who are hungry in Gaza right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they provide currently around 300,000 meals a day. The World Food Program, which is part of the UN, provides 400,000 a day.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: So they're a very significant part of the aid response in Gaza right now. But World Central Kitchen will no longer be operating in Gaza. Is that right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For the moment, that's right. So after the strike happened, they came out and said that they were freezing their operations in Gaza and also a number of other locations around the Middle East.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: In response to this, they said that their staff didn't feel comfortable. and needed reassurances that they would be protected and not targeted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there also seems to be a part of this, they didn't say this, but it appears that this situation is providing some leverage because the humanitarian situation is so desperate that if World Central Kitchen stops providing aid and others follow suit, a few other groups have, it creates a real problem.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: And I think there's a push from the organization and from Jose Andres personally on the Israeli government, on the American government to do more to help civilians, to stop them from being killed, and to protect humanitarian workers who are just trying to feed people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the time, this looks like it's not a war against the regime anymore. It seems this is a war against humanity itself.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: You cannot be destroying every building. You cannot be destroying every hospital, every school. You cannot be targeting humanitarian. You cannot be targeting children.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Children, you cannot be finding the basis of what humanity should be standing for.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: And there really aren't that many options left. I mean, World Central Kitchen was stepping up in the absence of others.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And actually, Israel has been promoting them and other groups as a replacement to some UN organizations that Israel doesn't like.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: So it's sort of getting to the point where Israel doesn't want these UN agencies to operate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The other humanitarian groups don't feel comfortable operating. Israel has tried to provide food in Gaza, provide armed protection to convoys, and that has resulted in massacres of their own.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: There was an aid distribution in February that ended in a melee and shooting when Israeli forces said they felt threatened by the crowds, fired into the crowds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was stampedes and trampling. Over 100 people died.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: So there's really no obviously good solution to this, except for the Israeli military to improve the coordination and make sure something like this doesn't happen again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there's a real trust deficit because this has happened so many times.
--:-- Stephen Kalin: And so we're really at potentially an inflection point here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Steven Kalin at the Wall Street Journal, wsj.com.
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--:-- [Discussion continues]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is back. Jeremy Konyndyk joins us. He's the president of Refugees International.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We asked him what his organization's been doing about this war.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So that has meant a lot of advocacy towards particularly the U.S. government around their policies on humanitarian access and civilian protection in Gaza.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Most of Gaza at this point is displaced. So we've done a lot of field research in the region and then a lot of policy work and advocacy work based here in D.C. as well.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Now, what have you found in your research? A few big things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The narrative and the kind of story of this with respect to U.S. policy has been a huge disconnect between means and ends.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Three days after the October 7th attacks, the president called on Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government to ensure that they would fight this war in line with international humanitarian law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And what that means in practice is protecting civilians, allowing aid access, not hitting humanitarians, not blocking humanitarian aid, not applying collective punishment or besiegement tactics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All of those are elements of international humanitarian law. All of those are obviously things that the Israeli government has been violating very routinely for six months.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: We uphold the laws of war, the law of war. It matters. There's a difference.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And six months into this, the U.S. rhetoric has gotten sharper, but the fundamental policy has not changed.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: I and many others, starting with President Biden, have worked to impress upon Israel the moral, the strategic, the legal imperative of doing everything possible to provide humanitarian assistance to people who need it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, they are calling for things that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government are ignoring, but not making any, frankly, acknowledgement of that, and much less an adjustment to policy as a result.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: They are not putting the leverage they have into play. The United States is selling Israel missiles and fighter jets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is it doing about this humanitarian crisis, about feeding Gazans?
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So, you know, the U.S. has deployed a what's called a DART team, a disaster assistance response team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is a high-quality gold standard response team.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Those are the teams that I used to oversee when I was at USAID.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I worked there for three and a half years under the Obama administration running the humanitarian division of USAID.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So they have that team in the region operating with personnel in multiple countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They are funding different UN agencies. They are funding many NGOs.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And they appointed last fall Ambassador David Satterfield as an envoy for humanitarian diplomacy with the Israelis and other countries in the region.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're focused on several key issues. One is getting a continuous flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza to meet the legitimate needs of its people.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: The second is to work to get our American nationals, their families, those who have worked with us in Gaza, safely out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, those are good things, but they're not sufficient.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: You know, the narrative I think the administration tells itself is, look, right after October 7, Israel wasn't letting anything in. We implored that they let some things in and they started letting some aid in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We implored them then to open a crossing, they opened a crossing. A month later, we implored them to open another crossing, and eventually, after a lot of pressure, they opened another crossing.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And so the administration tells a story of very small incremental steps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those steps are not meaningless, but what that misses is the larger picture, which is none of those steps collectively are anywhere near sufficient to avert this catastrophic famine that is now growing in Gaza.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And this is where I think there's just a huge disconnect within U.S. policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They know the famine is coming. There's no serious dispute from the administration.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Barack Ravid, the amazing reporter from Axios, was tweeting today that Jake Sullivan had relayed to the Israeli government that a famine declaration is almost certainly coming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that's right. The famine that that will declare is already underway because those famine declarations are retroactive.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So the famine's there. The famine is happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You don't get to a famine in a place like this if everything is going well.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Famine is a political outcome. It's not a natural outcome.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it just speaks to the level of continued obstruction by the Israeli government and the fundamental failure by the U.S. government to actually affect a change in that trajectory.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So how do we change it? World Central Kitchen is suspending its operations, which means Gazans are not going to get millions of meals that they would have otherwise had had it not been for this airstrike.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do we make sure that Gazans aren't dying of hunger on top of everything else they're dying of right now?
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: There's no way to achieve that without a ceasefire, period. You know, if you were to try and design in a lab a perfect environment for famine, it would look a lot like Gaza today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is an inability of aid to get in. There is a woefully insufficient amount of food. There is malnutrition that is skyrocketing because of that.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Aid groups cannot put into place the kind of malnutrition treatment centers that are required once kids reach an advanced state of severe malnutrition.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And on the disease front of course the health system is completely shattered.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So there's very little ability to implement the kind of medical and public health measures you need to prevent the spread and treat the spread of disease.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of the diseases that tend to spread and tend to kill people in famine are waterborne diseases.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And the whole water sector is shot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Israelis are blocking things like the importation of chlorine tabs, which are what humanitarian normally use if the water system is shot.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So like if you have a water system that's broken down, you distribute chlorine tabs at a household level so a household can purify water in their home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those are blocked from entering by the Israelis because they consider them a dual-use item, which is just inexplicable to me.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So none of the capabilities, none of the programs and tools that the humanitarian system has to fight famine can be rolled out in Gaza right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's very hard to see how any of that will become feasible without a ceasefire.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: I mean, you're saying that none of this is solved without a ceasefire, but it seems like we can't even all agree whether we're at risk of famine here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Isn't that right? AIPAC and Israel are both saying that there isn't a risk of famine, that there isn't widespread starvation in Gaza?
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: I don't think that's taken very seriously outside of Israel and AIPAC, frankly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Certainly the administration is not taking that seriously.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: The way that famines are assessed and declared is built on a really rigorous process with a lot of data and evidence underneath it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you think of something like the hurricane early warning system.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So the hurricane early warning system is a five-phase scale.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a ton of data and evidence that goes into that.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: You think of the projections that are made when there's a hurricane.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you can't predict the exact course of the hurricane with exact precision, but you can have a pretty good sense of trajectory and of the power of what you're facing.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And it's good enough that we rely on it, right? We rely on that system to tell us when it's time to clear the beaches in Florida or North Carolina or wherever that thing's going to hit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's similar with the famine early warning system.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So similarly, it's a five-phase scale.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The sorts of things that it measures are different, but they're things like the availability of food, surveying households on the level of access to food that they have, monitoring the prices of food, monitoring malnutrition, monitoring death rates.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: The threshold for declaring a famine is based on three things. Is there at least one fifth of the population that is routinely struggling to access enough food?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gaza blew through that threshold months ago.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: The second threshold is a malnutrition threshold, are at least 30% of kids under five acutely malnourished.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there are parts of Gaza that are already past that.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And then the third is the death rate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is what we haven't yet seen.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Obviously, the death rates have been very high from the war and war trauma.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, the secondary death rate from starvation and disease will follow.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And we know from a lot of experience that when you have a population hitting these levels of food deprivation and these levels of malnutrition, it's only a matter of time before the mortality then begins to follow because that's just what happens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can't starve out a population and expect people not to start dying.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: The defense or the kind of the pushback on that from the Israelis, I think it's not being taken seriously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And from what, again, Barack Ravid was reporting, they tried pushing back on that with Jake Sullivan.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Doesn't sound like he took the bait.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they're not pushing back on that with counter evidence.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: What they're pushing back on is a strategic communications campaign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're putting pictures of like food and markets.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And what that says to me as someone who's done this work for a long time is they don't actually understand how famines work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is not unusual to see food in markets when you have a famine because a famine is not just a matter of is food available, but it's a matter of is food available at a price people can broadly afford.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And that's another element of what we're seeing in Gaza, that the whole economy is completely destroyed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not functioning right now. People have exhausted their savings. They don't have income.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And so, you know, you might have food in the market, but if no one can afford to buy it, they can't access it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's something we routinely see.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: I traveled in northern Nigeria and parts of Ethiopia during very, very severe food crises in those countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you'd often see food in the markets. The problem was people couldn't afford it.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: So in the absence of a ceasefire, what's going to happen in the coming weeks regarding hunger, starvation, famine, and aid in Gaza?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, what's going to happen as night follows day is we're going to see a really significant wave of rising mortality related to the famine.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: You're starting to see the front edges of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I need to extend the hurricane analogy.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: I think what we're seeing right now is sort of like the outer bands of a Category 5 hurricane beginning to make landfall in Florida.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The eye hasn't made landfall yet, but the outer bands are starting.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And when you see, as we're now seeing, pictures of young children dying of very obvious starvation in extreme, extreme states of malnutrition, that tells you that unless there is a major shift, a major surge in aid to correct that and to change that situation, to change the fundamentals there, that it's the front edge of the wave of what's going to be a very large number of deaths.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so far, the kind of aid operation that could contain that is not possible in Gaza.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: And so until there is a ceasefire to enable that, I don't see a way that this famine is contained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Amanda Llewellyn and Avishay Artsy produced the program today.
--:-- Jeremy Konyndyk: We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlain, and mixed by David Herman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, and this is Today Explained. Thank you.
