Saifeddin Abutaha, a humanitarian worker for World Central Kitchen, was on his way home to see his mother when an Israeli rocket hit the car he was driving in a humanitarian convoy last week.
Mr Abutaha, 25, adored his parents and texted them frequently while sending aid to the Gaza Strip, which is on the brink of starvation after six months of war. In his final hours, he had rotated between delivering food and preparing family plans for Ramadan, his brother, Abdul Raziq Abutaha, said in an interview.
But since his death on April 1, their mother Inshirah – who once dreamed of seeing Saifeddin get married – has been unable to accept that he is gone.
“He still hasn’t eaten anything since he died,” said Abdul Raziq, 33. He said he keeps saying, “He’ll be back soon, maybe for Eid” — the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. It starts on Wednesday. Saif will not be there.
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen employees in the Israeli attack on April 1 has sparked international outrage, especially from the countries where six of them are from: Britain, Poland, Australia, Canada and the United States.
Mr Abutaha, a Palestinian from Gaza, was also killed in the attack. His death underscored the grim fact that most of the more than 200 aid workers killed since Israel began shelling Gaza were Palestinians, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. He called last week for an independent investigation into each of their deaths, which have attracted less attention than the killing of foreign aid workers.
Palestinian workers are the backbone of the humanitarian response in Gaza, as are local workers in any war zone or disaster area where aid groups operate. They provide vital connections and on-the-ground expertise to foreign staff members unfamiliar with the region, enabling them to implement relief projects and connect with the people they serve.
Mr. Abutaha worked for World Central Kitchen as a guide and translator, helping its staff navigate the bureaucracy, political climate and city streets in the places where he grew up, and where until the missile attack he provided critical aid. His association with a well-known and well-organized group brought with it something unusual in Gaza these days, his family said: a seeming security.
“We never, ever thought that Saif would be hit or killed,” Abdul Raziq said last week. “This is an international humanitarian group that has had very high coordination with Israel and its military.”
This coordination did not protect Mr Abutaha and his colleagues. An internal investigation by the Israeli military concluded that their killings were a “serious mistake” caused by a series of failures and broken protocols, and found that officers ordered the strikes on the aid convoy based in part on insufficient and faulty evidence that a passenger in one of the cars was armed.
Israel said several military officials involved in the attack were reprimanded or fired.
But José Andrés, the high-profile celebrity chef who founded World Central Kitchen, called for an independent investigation. On Sunday, in an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” he said “the perpetrator cannot investigate himself.”
“Obviously this was targeted,” Mr. Andrés said of the killings, which were carried out by three separate strikes, one after the other, that hit three vehicles carrying the workers. “We could argue that the first one, let’s say, was a mistake. The second? The third?”
Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza after an October 7 attack led by Hamas killed around 1,200 people near the border, according to Israeli authorities. Israel says its goal is to destroy the group.
But while the war has so far killed more than 33,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials, Hamas has not been destroyed. Its senior leaders remain alive, its fighters remain active, and it has regrouped in areas of Gaza.
Abdul Raziq Abutaha said that before the war began, his younger brother was set for as bright a future as any youth could hope for in the Gaza Strip, which has been under a punitive blockade by Egypt and Israel since the Hamas took power there in 2007.
Saif attended Ajman University in the United Arab Emirates, Abdul Raziq said, and was working in the United Arab Emirates until his father asked him to return home in 2020. He wanted Saif to help run the family business, a flour mill.
But running the mill became impossible during the war, after Israeli attacks destroyed much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and left the company without essential raw materials such as electricity or flour.
One day, however, members of the World Central Kitchen staff visited the family warehouse and liked what they saw. They chose the location to serve as a headquarters in Gaza, after coordinating with the Israeli military, Abdul Raziq said.
Aid workers began living in an apartment inside the factory, and soon they and the family grew close, sharing meals and bonding over the scars of war.
“We loved them and they loved us,” said Abdul Raziq.
World Central Kitchen staff asked Saif to translate for them during a meeting and then hired him as a guide and translator. He and the foreign staff quickly became inseparable, his sister Amani said in an interview with Al-Ghad TV, an Arabic-language channel.
“He was always with the foreigners, translating for them and going to gather help,” he said. “Because he lived in Gaza and knew the streets of Gaza well, he was a driver.”
Abdul Raziq said his brother was “happy” to find work helping war victims and that their family found a kind of blessing in the fact that he “died while on duty feeding poor and hungry people” during the holy month. of Ramadan.
On the day Saif died, the small World Central kitchen team had left its premises in the southern Gaza Strip and traveled north, Abdul Raziq said. Saif checked in with his family throughout the day. His sister, Amani, said their last exchange was at 4pm, when Saif sent her a selfie he took while waiting for a cargo ship to arrive.
“I told him to take care of himself and God bless him,” she said. “He replied: ‘I rely on God.’ I didn’t know that soon God would take it all.”
Saif also texted Abdul Raziq saying he was going home to prepare for the next day’s Ramadan fast with their mother. He then sent one last message to their mother, asking: “Did you go to sleep yet, mom?”
