Mother Jones/France 24; Andalou/Getty
On June 6, Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year US Army veteran and Green Beret, found himself facing a daunting logistical problem. He had been recruited as a security contractor for UG Solutions, a partner of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—the Israel-backed American nonprofit now overseeing food distribution in the devastated Palestinian territory. His challenge: finding a way to feed the local Palestinian workers assisting with GHF’s efforts. “Nobody could figure out how to get food there,” he says.
So Aguilar says they settled on a workaround: ordering stacks of Domino’s pizzas via an Israeli delivery app and picking them up at the Gaza border themselves. “We then took those 27 pizzas in an armored convoy,” he says, to a GHF distribution site within the strip.
For Aguilar, it was a striking example of systemic failures at GHF, “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning,” he says. “It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic.”
Aguilar has been speaking out about what he witnessed while working with GHF in May and June, adding to the controversy about the organization’s role in Gaza’s emerging famine. Recently, he sat down with France 24’s Jessica Le Masurier, who, along with Mother Jones, is publishing excerpts from an on-camera interview with Aguilar about his experiences.
The United Nations accuses the private organization of militarizing aid operations. Its Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that between May 27 and July 21, 766 Palestinians were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites. As Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy recently pointed out, what GHF provides after Israel has blocked most other aid represents a massive reduction in help for starving Palestinians: “Instead of the approximately 400 aid sites and mobile clinics that the humanitarian community was operating, GHF set up just four sites in southern Gaza, far from the north where most of the population is concentrated.”
“Palestinians are getting hurt,” Aguilar tells Le Masurier, recounting episodes in which he claims his fellow personnel were “utilizing nonlethal munitions and lethal munitions in unauthorized ways.” In one instance, he says he saw a contractor throw a stun grenade that detonated, its metal top hitting a woman’s head and rendering her motionless before she was wheeled away by a donkey cart. (France 24 and Mother Jones could not identify the woman or determine whether she was killed.)
In an incident on May 29, Aguilar says he witnessed two contractors firing rifles “in bursts” from vantage points around a GHF distribution site “into the crowd.” In video footage supplied by Aguilar, someone can be heard yelling, “I think you hit one.” Another shouts, “Hell yeah, boy!”
“There was catcalling and celebrating,” Aguilar says. “They were cheering.” (The video was previously reported by the Associated Press.)
In a statement to France 24 and Mother Jones, UG Solutions confirmed that its personnel fired warning shots near GHF facilities but denied they “have ever directed” them toward civilians, rather “upwards, in the air and towards the coastline.” The group also states on its website that the contractor heard in the video was “encouraging IDF [Israel Defense Forces] fire” and has since been terminated. GHF also said that gunfire heard in the video “originated from the IDF, which was outside the immediate vicinity of the GHF site,” and called Aguilar’s descriptions the event “categorically false.”
More broadly, UG Solutions denies Aguilar’s allegations, calling him a “disgruntled former contractor who seeks revenge.” Aguilar adamantly disputes the characterization. Safe Reach Solutions, a UG contractor that Aguilar says was involved in the pizza incident, did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, the IDF said: “Following incidents in which harm to civilians who arrived at distribution facilities was reported, thorough examinations were conducted in the Southern Command and instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned. The incidents are under review by the competent authorities in the IDF.” Israel announced last weekend that it would pause fighting in parts of Gaza for 10 hours a day to allow, in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the entry of minimal humanitarian supplies.”
One memory remains especially haunting to Aguilar. He showed Le Masurier video of a shoeless boy approaching him alone at a distribution site, who kissed his hand. In the chaos that followed, amid warning shots and tear gas, Aguilar was struck by the child’s innocence: “This young boy had nothing to do with what Hamas did on October 7th.”