José Andrés Celebrity chef who brings food relief to the starving

When José Andrés of accepted the challenge delivering food aid to Gaza last month, he declared without a trace of overstatement - he was "working with the urgency of now".

- Robert Tait, Sam Jones 

"It's worth trying. We have to try. If we succeed, everybody is helped," the celebrity chef turned food aid supremo said of his plan to use his non-profit World Central Kitchen (WCK) to help avert the looming humanitarian disaster.

On display was the same irrepressible, can-do spirit that had enabled the Spanish-born Andrés, now a US citizen, to bring food relief to people stricken by natural disaster or war, from Haiti to Ukraine.

It was a measure of Andrés' devastation- and of the threat to humanitarian workers in the region - that he responded to the Israeli drone strike that killed seven WCK workers on Monday night by taking the difficult decision to pause the charity's operations in the battered coastal strip.

Responding to the news on X, Andrés said he was "heartbroken". "These are people... angels," he wrote. "They are not faceless... they are not nameless." He went on to castigate Israel in blunt terms: "The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon."

As details of the killings emerged, he said that the WCK workers had been travelling in three clearly marked vehicles when they were struck by a succession of drone-fired missiles. "They were targeted systematically, car by car," Andrés said.