Warning: Graphic images and details below.
A retired U.S. Army officer who worked as a subcontractor for the shadowy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is sounding the alarm over the atrocities he said he saw Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries carry out against starving Palestinians trying to access aid.
Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, who served 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, was hired as an independent subcontractor by UG Solutions to serve as armed security for the private, U.S.-funded GHF, which launched its so-called aid delivery sites in May.
“When I first went into this, I was excited. I felt it was a noble cause,” he told Democracy Now! on Tuesday. “Within hours of being in Israel and seeing how this was going to unfold, I immediately had dire concerns as to the intentions, as to the execution, and what was going to happen when this fails.”
Aguilar said he ended his contract on June 14 after witnessing his fellow security officers and soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces repeatedly open fire on Palestinian civilians who had trekked to GHF’s four aid hubs. Armed officers often celebrated hitting civilians at the sites, where the United Nations says more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed.
A young boy carries an aid parcel from the privately-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation near the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, on June 25, 2025.
Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images
The IDF has maintained that soldiers only use their guns to deliver warning shots for unruly crowds. But Aguilar said that officers attacked civilians with tank rounds, mortars and fully automatic weapons with at least 210 rounds each of green-tipped, armor-piercing ammunition designed to kill.
“The sites have not only become death traps, they were designed as death traps,” Aguilar told the outlet. “All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone.”
Since leaving Gaza, Aguilar has spoken to several media outlets and leaders about the horrors he saw while working for GHF, which was already under intense backlash from the international community for essentially weaponizing food aid against an entire people. Aguilar said to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) on Tuesday that “a lightbulb went off in my head” when he was told directly that UG Solutions’ client was the IDF.
UG Solutions and the GHF have both rejected Aguilar’s testimony as false, painting the officer as a disgruntled worker who wants revenge after allegedly being fired “for inappropriate behavior.” The IDF has said that it is investigating incidents of civilian harm at aid sites, though the military is known for either not completing probes or avoiding handing down consequences.
Palestinians check bodies of people killed while waiting for aid a day earlier, at the Al-Shifa Hospital’s morgue in Gaza City, on July 31, 2025. Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli forces killed at least 30 people when they opened fire on a crowd waiting for humanitarian aid on July 30.
Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images
“I didn’t take on this mission for personal gain or money. I took this mission because I believed in it,” Aguilar said. “I resigned my contract and left, walked away from the money — and they were paying us a lot of money — walked away from that money, because nothing is going to buy my soul. Nothing is going to pay for my values and my patriotism as an American.”
Aguilar also documented the violence and chaos occurring at GHF sites from when he worked there, showing Van Hollen photos he’d taken of Palestinian civilians who were later attacked by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries. He also said that those very American mercenaries are in Gaza on a tourist visa — the same kind a family member would use to visit Israel.
In one of his videos, first obtained by The Associated Press, gunfire can be heard at a site followed by American mercenaries whooping and cheering. One American says off-camera, “I think you hit one,” while another shouts, “Hell yeah, boy!” Aguilar said the shooters were UG Solutions contractors firing into a crowd of departing Palestinians.
GHF has accused Aguilar of forging documents and presenting misleading videos, to which the whistleblower pushed back on by saying his videos’ metadata and geolocation have been analyzed for credibility, and that he wrote those operational plans because no other staff members had the experience to do it themselves.
“Inexperienced, untrained, no idea of how to conduct operations of this magnitude. That would be my most benign assessment. In my most frank assessment, I would say that they’re criminal,” he told the BBC on Saturday. “In my entire career I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population — an unarmed, starving population.”
20 Years OfFreeJournalism
Your Support Fuels Our Mission
Your Support Fuels Our Mission
For two decades, HuffPost has been fearless, unflinching, and relentless in pursuit of the truth. Support our mission to keep us around for the next 20 — we can’t do this without you.
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
In a Wednesday report by France24 and Mother Jones, Aguilar recalled being ordered to find food for GHF’s local Palestinian workers, who were hungry like the rest of the population. Officers eventually ordered 27 pizzas from a Domino’s in Israel and had it delivered to the Kerem Shalom crossing — all while lines of aid trucks remained blocked from entering Gaza by Israeli authorities.
GHF has proudly claimed that it’s delivered 98 million meals in Gaza since May 26. But dividing that number by 2.2 million — the territory’s estimated population — and then further dividing that by three for the nutritionally recommended number of meals a day — the result amounts to about 14.8 days of meals. GHF has been operating for 66 days.