The Green Beret of Gaza

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I’ve been thinking about Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Aguilar ever since I watched an interview he did with BBC News on Friday. In the interview the Army veteran describes his recent stint in Palestine as a contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an American and Israeli-backed nonprofit that has been given almost full control over food distribution to starving civilians, and which has been reportedly shooting and killing some of those very civilians at their distribution centers. Aguilar was asked, “Do you think you were a witness to war crimes?” He replied: “Without question I witnessed war crimes.”

Aguilar isn’t a media personality and he’s not someone (to my knowledge) who's gone through extensive public speaking training. But in the past few days Aguilar, a 25-year veteran of the US Army and a Green Beret, has used his voice to amplify his unique experience as a witness to the systematic starvation and killing of civilians in Gaza. Tuesday he sat down with Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to describe in greater detail what he saw and shared many disturbing revelations—among them, he alleged American contractors participated in the killing.

“I know what I saw,” Aguilar told Van Hollen in a taped conversation. “I'm a man of integrity. I've served my country and I've proven that and I can be trusted.” He said on numerous occasions he saw Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) firing into the crowds of Palestinians seeking aid—not just with rifles or machine guns, but with tanks, artillery, mortars and missiles. “Not because they were combatants or because they were hostile or because they were Hamas,” Aguilar said, “but simply as a means to control the crowd.”

“They [Palestinians] get shot at by the IDF, and unfortunately, they get shot at by American contractors on the ground.”

The entirety of Aguilar’s 27-minute conversation with Van Hollen is well worth your time. In it he explained GHF’s setup in Gaza, which provided important insight into an opaque operation run by an opaque organization contracted by an even more opaque foreign government. It was made explicitly clear to Aguilar and other GHF employees that the IDF was their client. “Humanitarian aid should not be distributed through a humanitarian assistance mechanism that is controlled by a combatant in a war,” he said.

There are a total of just four food distribution sites, as compared to the 400 previously run in Gaza by the UN, and all of them are in Southern Gaza. There are no food sites north of the Netzarim Corridor, a dividing line in the enclave just south of Gaza City. That means no GHF aid is reaching North Gaza, and people living in the North aren’t allowed to travel south to attempt to get any food. And people who are able to move from certain parts of the south to reach aid aren’t allowed to return home after. Aguilar called this Israel’s “displacement strategy.” According to him, Gaza is receiving just three percent of the amount of aid it was getting when the UN controlled distribution. 

Aguilar described the food sites as a “free-for-all,” with thousands of Palestinians competing for the small amount of aid allowed in by GHF. “It became a survival of the fittest. The Gaza Olympics. Hunger Games. Dystopian to the 10th degree.”

In what was perhaps the most harrowing story of all, Aguilar held up a photo and told the story of a young Palestinian boy he met near one of the distribution sites who was crying and starving. The boy took Aguilar’s hand and kissed it and said “shukran,” meaning thank you in Arabic. “I kneeled down to look at him in the face so I can let him know that people care.” 

After the boy exited the area with a group, Aguilar heard machine gunfire ostensibly being used to hurry the Palestinians away from the distribution site. He ran over to survey the scene and saw the boy among the dead.

In the past few days there has been increased pressure on Israel by international powers to allow more aid to flow and to stop the forced starvation of Gaza. Despite rumors by the IDF—and repeated by the New York Times—that aid was slowed because Hamas was stealing it, the Israeli military itself admitted there was never any proof. “In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population,” the Times wrote. 

Senator Van Hollen, along with 21 other Democratic senators, are now calling on the Trump administration to stop funding GHF. 

“Since this GHF scheme began, public reports have found that more than 700 starving people have been killed and nearly 5,000 injured while desperately seeking food at or near often chaotic GHF distribution sites,” the senators wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “According to reports and eyewitness accounts, civilians have been fired at by tanks, drones, and helicopters, as well as soldiers on the ground, as they attempt to get food and humanitarian supplies. Despite these concerns, the State Department approved $30 million for GHF in late June.”

In an alert sent out early Tuesday the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC), a UN-backed monitor, said “The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip…Immediate action must be taken to end the hostilities and allow for unimpeded, large-scale, life-saving humanitarian response. This is the only path to stopping further deaths and catastrophic human suffering.”

Meanwhile, the United States remains complicit in the ongoing genocide. In his conversation with Senator Van Hollen, Aguilar recalled witnessing a woman dying before his eyes after being hit with a stun grenade fired by an American contractor. He said she died “Not from the IDF, not from starvation, not from trampling because Hamas incited a stampede. We killed her.”