The First World Central Kitchen Trucks Enter Gaza
November 20, 2023 | Gaza, Palestine – Since Tuesday of last week, Anera has received in Gaza six trucks from World Central Kitchen – a non-profit organization that provides meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises – and our partner in delivering food aid to families displaced by the war. The trucks, which came through the Rafah border with Egypt, contain food.
Anera will immediately begin using the supplies to continue making hot meals for people living in shelters. To date, with the support of World Central Kitchen (WCK), Anera has locally procured and delivered enough food to provide more than four million meals. These first truck deliveries from outside of Gaza will help Anera’s team on the ground to expand their work and move away from having to rely on rapidly depleting supplies from local vendors.
The war in Gaza has entered its second month. Over 1.7 million people, 74% of the population, have been displaced. Shelters are so crowded that people have to sleep in shifts and there are about 160 people per toilet. There has been no electricity in Gaza for a month and fuel supplies are almost out. Each Gazan subsists on an average of two to three liters of water every day, for all purposes. Many families are living on little more than bread, purchased after waiting in lines that are often four to six hours long.
An additional nine WCK trucks are due to arrive in the upcoming days and include canned goods, vegetables, flour, water, yeast, lentils, rice, oil, sardines, and tuna. These new supplies will provide the food that will make enough hot meals to serve tens of thousands of people.
“We are teetering on the edge of a critical shortage across all food categories,” says Anera President and CEO Sean Carroll. “These incoming trucks will allow us to continue providing tens of thousands of hot meals. In these horrific times, the meals are more than sustenance, they are a lifeline of hope. Our goal is to be able to scale up and provide a million hot meals a day.”
World Central Kitchen is putting together 77 more shipments in Egypt to go into Gaza as soon as possible. They will more food, water, and charcoal stoves, along with fuel, which will ease the difficulties in hot meal production. And the Anera team in Gaza will be ready to make meals and distribute the food quickly to families living in very difficult conditions.
SEAN CARROLL IS AVAILABLE FOR A LIMITED NUMBER OF INTERVIEWS
For more information:
In Washington, DC
Steven Fake
Media Relations Officer
202.266.9719
[email protected]
(UTC-05)
In Ramallah
Ibtisam Rashid
Palestine Communications
[email protected]
(UTC+02)
About Anera
Since 1968, Anera has helped refugees and others hurt by conflicts in the Middle East live with dignity and purpose. Anera, which has no political or religious affiliation, works on the ground with partners in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Lebanon, and Jordan. We mobilize resources for immediate humanitarian relief and for sustainable health, education, and economic development efforts. Our staff are from the communities they serve, navigating the politics that constrict progress to get help where it’s needed most. We will keep building better lives until hope finds its way in the Middle East.
About World Central Kitchen
World Central Kitchen is first to the frontlines, providing fresh meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises. WCK teams have served meals to people recovering from crisis every single day. Hurricanes, wildfires, tsunamis, and volcano eruptions took the team across the world, growing in knowledge and capacity with each crisis. Initially responding to just natural disasters, WCK quickly expanded the definition of disasters to include helping poeple in extreme poverty and those displaced by or caught up in war.