Aid not delivered to Gaza returns to Cyprus after death of aid workers

A sea convoy with food not delivered to Gaza returned to Cyprus on Wednesday after aid workers from the World Central Kitchen (WCK) were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Monday.

With 240 tons of food destined for the population of the besieged Palestinian enclave, the cargo ship set sail after the deadly attack back to Larnaca, Cyprus, anchoring near the port.

A second ship, the Open Arms, owned by a Spanish NGO working with WCK, had previously arrived in Cyprus.

The undelivered aid was part of a shipment of around 340 tons sent from Cyprus to Gaza on March 30. The aid workers killed in Gaza had just unloaded 100 tons from a barge, also sent from Cyprus.

Active in Gaza since October, the WCK has paused its operations in the territory since the deaths and turned its flotilla of ships toward Cyprus.

In March, WCK inaugurated a maritime corridor for transporting humanitarian aid to the enclave from the island in the eastern Mediterranean region.

Cyprus has offered to complement aid arriving in Gaza by sea with an accelerated security screening process on the island for aid overseen by Israel.

Spanish charity Open Arms, which provided a rescue ship for the two missions organized by WCK, took a photo of activists wearing WCK t-shirts hugging each other on the bow of the ship during the trip to Cyprus.

They wrote on the X: “The end of mission 110 arrives, the one we could never have imagined, the most painful.”

“We miss Saifeddin, Zomi, Damian, Jacob, John, Jim and James, but they will forever remain in our memory, and we will continue to speak out for them, for the more than 32,500 people killed in Gaza , for the hundreds of aid workers, for the destroyed hospitals, for the journalists and for all the ‘isolated cases’ that are not an accident but part of a structure of death and destruction. We will never forget you.”