War is hell. Chef José Andrés learned that the hard way when his World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza was hit by the IDF on Monday in a horrific “friendly fire” incident. But the celebrity chef is now openly accusing Israel of targeting the trucks.

Perhaps this is just a very upset man who is lashing out. Or maybe this is someone whose idealistic leftist bubble just got popped in a very terrible way. But Chef Andrés is not mincing words – he is blaming the IDF for intentionally blowing up the World Central Kitchen vehicles.

Speaking via video, Andres said the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity group he founded had clear communication with the Israeli military, which he said knew his aid workers’ movements.

“This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,” Andres said.

“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,” he said. It’s “very clear who we are and what we do.”

Andres said the IDF was aware of the convoy’s whereabouts, opens new tab. He called for investigations of the incident by the U.S. government and by the home country of every aid worker that was killed.

“They were targeting us in a deconflicting zone, in an area controlled by IDF. They knowing that it was our teams moving on that road … with three cars,” he said.

Andres said there may have been more than three strikes against the aid convoy. He rejected Israeli and U.S. assertions that the strike was not deliberate.

“Initially, I would say categorically no,” Andres said when asked if he accepted that explanation.

“Even if we were not in coordination with the (Israel Defense Forces), no democratic country and no military can be targeting civilians and humanitarians,” he added.

As I covered yesterday, Israel has apologized and has promised to investigate what happened – and Joe Biden rushed to sympathize with Chef Andrés while hypocritically condemning Israel. But the investigation isn’t complete, Israel has not released its final report on what happened, but Andrés, who apparently knows all and sees all, just knows that this was deliberate.

Here is a question for the chef – if the attack was deliberate, what was the net benefit for Israel? Andrés just says that Israel is fighting a “war against humanity” because he is a good leftist who knows all the catchphrases. Evidence? He doesn’t need no stinkin’ evidence! Apparently Israel fighting in a war they didn’t start is evidence enough. If Israel really wanted to, they could have flattened Gaza to rubble on October 8th. That doesn’t seem to have occurred to Andrés, who seems to also think that his charity and their “very colorful logo” should have acted as some kind of magical force field. As POLITICO pointed out on Wednesday, the celebrity chef has friends in high places – but was seemingly unprepared for what going into a war zone would mean.

Andrés’ path to rock star status is an evolution that says as much about Washington as it does about Andrés — and makes the fallout from the killing worth watching as a barometer of Beltway opinion about Israel’s campaign against Hamas.

By day’s end, President Joe Biden had joined the throngs reaching out to Andrés to offer condolences, another indication of the chef’s Washington cachet — and perhaps an indication of what might be at stake if the sorrow over the killings curdles into a more focused and vocal opposition to Israeli strategy. World Central Kitchen has officially paused its food-relief work in hunger-ravaged Gaza.

The Spanish-born chef is not one to shrink from conflict… But where many of the chefs pushing the local restaurant scene were content to stick to their own social world, Andrés became something of a Washington man about town, showing up at Beltway social events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and scoring bylines in The Atlantic — a guy who knew how to play nice with people in public life.

In a way, it made him a classic D.C. figure: In the weird social currency of permanent Washington, a local celeb whose fame comes from something other than politics or government is automatically a hot ticket. It didn’t hurt that the very presence of a globe-bestriding chef flatters Washingtonians who are forever worried about their city being called a backwater.

Andrés, in turn, was able to use the proximity to politics-and-government circles to make himself more than a celebrity chef. It’s hard to imagine an equally philanthropic and ambitious chef in Chicago or Boston being able to access the same networks that helped grow World Central Kitchen into an emergency-food-aid colossus. On his podcast, he has guests like Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Cory Booker, former national security adviser Susan Rice and actor-cum-former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

World Central Kitchen is both Chef Andrés’ charity and his brand. And this meant that he had friends in high places who let him do things because of his celebrity status.

The fame has brought occasional scrutiny. Late last year, a withering Bloomberg News story reported that as World Central Kitchen moved from responding to natural disasters to entering war zones, Andrés’ aversion to bureaucracy — credited with helping the organization remain nimble in the face of daunting challenges — also exposed its people to danger.

The Bloomberg News story referenced here is from last December, which profiled Andrés and World Central Kitchen as having problems that come directly from the top – along with alleged fraud issues and employees allegedly being sexually harrassed by people in leadership (not Andrés himself).

As WCK’s co-founder, face and “chief feeding officer,” Andrés officially has no serious role in its day-to-day management, but this dramatically understates his involvement. More than two dozen current and former employees, contractors and volunteers, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals, say Andrés frequently, if unpredictably, manages relief efforts on the ground. They say he has a fierce antipathy to bureaucracy and regularly sends his people into the thick of an urgent disaster or, if the logistics make that impossible, has them pay local restaurants to share their larders with neighbors. The chef’s orders sometimes arrive when he’s on the ground with a WCK response team and at other times when he’s half a world away, texting directives to the team’s group chat. WCK insiders call this phenomenon “Hurricane José.”

People who’ve worked directly with Andrés at WCK say he’s not known to be forgiving. Several described his tendency to publicly shame employees over mistakes as minor as forgetting the ketchup on a sandwich, or requests as reasonable as increased security training and protocols in a country where authorities have warned about kidnappings. Several also say the pressure to take on dangerous assignments often comes directly from Andrés, via WhatsApp messages and tense phone calls. In a message Businessweek reviewed, Andrés chides a staffer for suggesting they wouldn’t go to Haiti without a beefed-up security plan or proper training. “What? I think we need to rethink who we are and what we are,” Andrés wrote. “We will respond!”

Over the past couple of years, current and former employees and contractors say, WCK’s lack of formal safety protocols has grown tougher to ignore. Sechachalam, who was used to rigorous trainings from his years of work with other disaster relief nonprofits, says he was shocked that WCK provided no safety briefing or gear on his way to earthquake relief efforts in Turkey—no hard hat in case something falls on you, no brightly colored vest in case you get knocked out, not even a KN95 or equivalent mask to protect against such contaminants as asbestos. Instead, Andrés sent a message to the Turkey team’s WhatsApp group chat, telling them to ignore a governor’s orders to avoid landslide areas. “We don’t care about governors … we care about people,” he wrote in the group chat, according to a screenshot of the message. “Send a food truck.” People reacted with praying hands, a flexing bicep and heart emojis.

So, Andrés gets to enjoy celebrity chef and humanitarian status by sending other people into disaster areas and war zones, which makes HIM look good. And while everyone admits that the goals of WCK are noble ones, the logistics are apparently more than a little sketchy or well thought out. And now, Andrés is having to face the very real consequences of his do-gooder impulses. Again, war is hell. Mistakes are made. Humanitarians should know better than most that people are, well, human, and they screw up. However, Andrés’ personality doesn’t seem to be one that tolerates screw-ups. Which is probably why he is lashing out at Israel with zero evidence to back up his claims – not that he was a huge fan of Israel to begin with.

World Central Kitchen does good work, but this is a blood libel unsupportable by logic or evidence. Also, Andres has been accusing Israel of targeting civilians and hospitals for months on Twitter, and called for a ceasefire on October 13, less than a week after October 7. https://t.co/k2m7iz5QwP

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) April 4, 2024

José Andrés is a major Democratic Party donor. His restaurants in California were granted an opt out from the commercial gas stove ban. They know that is going on here. https://t.co/hvhrtNSEtV

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 4, 2024

Ah yes, that gas stove ban. The chef did indeed get an exemption in California to use gas ranges in a newly-built restaurant in California. Again, it helps to have friends in high places, right?

Andrés has learned a very sad and painful lesson that even the most noble of intentions will not protect you in a war zone. His insistence on believing that Israel attacked the WCK trucks on purpose is perhaps more couched in grief than not, but his accusations have no proof, and stink. And that kind of stench can follow a charity – and the face of said charity – for a very long time.

Featured image: Chef José Andrés in 2022 with World Central Kitchen via the U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine Flickr account, cropped, public domain