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“I’ve witnessed a lot of war and in that there is nothing that compares to the level of destruction, the level of [dis]proportionality, the absolute disregard for Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law and considerations of the laws of armed conflict. [Nowhere] in my career… have I witnessed anything close to the absolute escalation of violence and [unnecessary] force I witnessed in Gaza.”
This is what Anthony Aguilar, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served for 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, tells host Chris Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, as he recalls his experiences in Gaza serving as a subcontractor for UG Solutions, which provides security for The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
His testimony has added another crucial dimension to understanding the genocide in this late stage, as hundreds of thousands face starvation and desperation for food and aid. While GHF presents itself as a humanitarian aid group, in reality it is an arm of Israel’s infrastructure of genocide, facilitating violence and imposing increased desperation against Palestinians at the behest of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Aguilar’s testimony — detailing the weaponry he was supplied as a contractor, the money he was paid, the operating procedures he was given and the internal structure linking the GHF and the IDF — provides undeniable evidence of Israel’s continued aggression and depravity. From high tech-surveillance that beams Palestinians with biometric scanners to scan their faces at aid sites, to dehumanizing crowd control techniques, to blatant indiscriminate murder, Aguilar makes clear that GHF is a project of Israeli genocide.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript:
Chris Hedges
Israel created the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which operates four food hubs in southern Gaza, replacing over 400 international aid distribution points. These four aid hubs are all located in southern Gaza. They are not designed to provide food and humanitarian aid to Gaza’s desperate population, but are designed to lure hungry Palestinians to the south, where they will eventually be held in concentration camps awaiting deportation.
In the mad scramble to get one of the few paltry food packages handed out at the four distribution sites, open only often for an hour at two in the morning, some 2,000 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more have been wounded by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries. Israel has cut nearly all humanitarian aid to Gaza since May 2nd. There is little clean water. Israel plans to sever all water in northern Gaza.
Food supplies are scarce or wildly overpriced. A bag of flour cost $22 a kilo. A report published by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classifications, or IPC, the world’s leading authority on food insecurity, for the first time has confirmed a famine in Gaza City. It says more than 500,000 people in Gaza are facing, “starvation, destitution, and death with catastrophic conditions projected to expand to Deir al Balah and Khan Younis next month.”
Nearly 300 people, including 112 children, have died from starvation. Johnnie Moore, a self-defined Christian Zionist, is the director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which receives about $30 million from the Trump administration. Moore was co-chair of the 2006 Trump presidential campaign’s Evangelical Advisory Board. He has also been part of a coalition of Christian leaders who have paid visits to the White House to hold prayer meetings in the Oval Office.
Anthony Aguilar is a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served for 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret. He was deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Jordan and the Philippines. He was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Shortly after he retired, Aguilar was hired to work as a subcontractor for UG Solutions, which provides security for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
He resigned from his job with UG Solutions after witnessing Palestinians being fatally shot as they tried to get food. He has spoken out publicly against the abuses committed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and released videos of its security personnel firing on unarmed Palestinians. Joining me to discuss the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is Anthony Aguilar.
Tony, let’s just begin with your own experience. 25 years in the military, you spent significant time in the Middle East. I found it fascinating that you would agree to go back, but just run through a little bit of your own background in the military.
Anthony Aguilar
Well sir, your introduction and description of what I witnessed in Gaza was absolutely spot on. I could not have put it better myself. So thank you for that perfectly described introduction of what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is doing.
In terms of my career, I entered service in the United States military as a commissioned officer, directly as a commissioned officer from the United States Military Academy at West Point. And I started my career as an infantry officer. In that capacity, I led soldiers, an infantry platoon, an infantry rifle platoon combat unit in Iraq.
During that deployment I saw it was post invasion into the rise of the counter-insurgency fight and the sectarian violence and the rise of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. So I saw Fallujah, I saw Sadr City, Baghdad, Mosul, Taji, Anbar, places that had been hit pretty hard in the fighting in the initial onset of the war that continue to experience fighting.
In the Philippines, in southern Mindanao. For those that may not be aware, we have been engaged in a fight in assisting the Philippine forces in the southern Philippines in Mindanao against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
In Afghanistan, I deployed throughout all of Afghanistan, the Helmand, north in Kandahar and Kabul and Uruzgan and Kunduz, so parts throughout Afghanistan where I also witnessed quite a bit. And then again in Iraq in the later years during and then post the fight against ISIS and the destruction there. In Syria, in northeast Syria in Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, Al-Baghuz Fawqani on the border and in Jordan and other places.
I’ve witnessed a lot of war and in that there is nothing that compares to the level of destruction, the level of in proportionality, the absolute disregard for Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law and considerations of the laws of armed conflict, nothing that I witnessed in my entire career in all the places that I previously named have I witnessed anything close to just the absolute escalation of violence and force that is unnecessary and what I witnessed in Gaza.
I’d like to give a quick anecdote to that, because you had mentioned how the food that we’re providing and how the population of Gaza is starving, critical level of starvation. Gaza City has been completely isolated with nothing going in or coming out since the ceasefire ended and before that in very small numbers was anything going in.
Northern Gaza is in a state of famine, that is an absolute fact. If there was a way to describe beyond famine, I don’t know what that description would be, but it would be that. And the rest of Gaza is in a critical, critical state of starvation. People are dying, and that’s a fact. And anybody that says that’s not the case should bear significant scrutiny as to why they would say something that’s so absurd. It’s happening.
Chris Hedges
Let me just ask, let me just stop there for a second. I just want to ask what is it, after spending significant time, and you were in Fallujah and Helmand, these were rough areas, I mean, let’s be clear, both very difficult in terms of resistance and combat and a lot of civilian casualties. What is it after 25 years that impelled you to go back, to return to a place like Gaza, return to the Middle East?
Anthony Aguilar
So when I retired, I retired from a long career with significant injuries. I had been wounded in combat. Many broken bones and injuries. I had my neck fused, my back fused, my shoulder had surgery, I had both of my feet reconstructed.
I had no intention of ever leaving the United States again for that fact. I did not intend to deploy or go anywhere. In May, when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s subcontract entity, UG Solutions, that’s providing the armed security in Gaza, they called me and they said they were specifically looking for recently retired or recently out of the military special operations background soldiers that they were looking to hire to fulfill these positions.
So when I was first asked, I was hesitant. In full transparency, I was hesitant. And even then, I had questions kind of in the back of my head about, you know, is this going to be… It seemed to me that it was a completely hodgepodge, thrown together, last minute, Wild West cowboy-like outfit that didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into. I knew that from the beginning.
So when I was hired by them, my thought process was I had no thought at that point at all that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions were going to be completely under the control of the IDF, doing the Israeli government’s bidding on their behalf and taking every order from them and being involved and not ignorant or led into a situation that they didn’t know what they were getting into, but they knew that they were getting into and what they were doing in terms of the position that GHF plays in the forced displacement.
And that is exactly what it is: Forced displacement into concentration camps. That is exactly what’s happening. I didn’t know that part. What I did know was that relief, aid, food, humanitarian aid was not getting into Gaza. The Israelis had blocked the United Nations from going in and nothing was going in at scale. I knew that.
I knew that the Gaza humanitarian Foundation in this larger project was going to have problems getting started. I could already tell just based on years of planning and experience that there were so many factors that hadn’t been into account that there was going to be significant issues in the beginning. And I made that clear when I got hired and part of the reason that led me to want to go was that one, I wanted to help.
I wanted to be a part of something that I was helping people that were in need, people that were in dire need, people that were starving. I wanted to help. And the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation at this time, because they were appointed by the Israeli government to do it, were the only entity, the only body to do it. Two, I did feel that I could provide significant contribution to helping the planning, the mission, and getting it off the ground into a way that would be efficient and sustainable. Those are my thoughts going in.
My initial thoughts going in, my assumptions if you will, were proven to be wrong in terms of what the Gaza humanitarian foundation is truly a part of. So why I went back, why I decided to go back into something that I knew would be dangerous and high risk and being away from family and being away from home is that I truly felt that the mission, the objective of the mission, not GHF, not the Greater Israeli Contract, but the mission itself to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to people that were dying, starving, and in dire need.
I wanted to be a part of helping that. I felt that it was a calling. When you serve 25 years in the Army, in the life of service, serving others is a calling.
Chris Hedges
Let me ask a little bit about logistics. I’m just curious, what kinds of weapons, I mean, what were you carrying and how did it compare with what you carried as a Green Beret? I mean, what kind of long-barreled weapons did you have? What kind of resources did you have in terms of military equipment once you got to Gaza?
Anthony Aguilar
So once we got weapons issued to us to go into Gaza, it stood out to me quite clearly that we were far over-equipped to be doing humanitarian assistance. But even in comparison to my military career, we were far over-equipped for what even a combat unit would have.
This is nuanced and most people may not understand this fact, but in the United States Army, when you’re issued your rifle, your long gun, your M4 assault rifle, in terms of shooting that weapon, you have a selector switch right that gives you safe, single shot, where you shoot one bullet at a time, or three round burst, where if you pull the trigger three bullets come out you pull the trigger three bullets come out.
There is no function that gives you fully automatic on an individually assigned rifle, meaning where you just pull down the trigger and you can expend an entire round of magazine and fully automatic. The United States military doesn’t have that functionality on its weapons; they actually stopped putting that function after Vietnam because it was realized that it’s inefficient, it’s ineffective.
So when we got issued our weapons, we were issued IWI [Israel Weapon Industries] brand weapons. It’s an Israeli company. It’s an Israeli weapons manufacturer. We were issued the ARAD assault rifle, fully automatic with a shortened barrel, close combat type barrel.
We were issued the IWI Jericho combat pistol. We were issued the IWI MAFTEAH Tactical Assault Shotgun. We were issued the IWI Negev fully automatic machine gun in 5.56 caliber — very, very similar to the United States Army Squad Automatic Weapon or M249 Bravo.
And we were issued fully automatic 7.62 machine guns which are equivalent to what the United States Army uses in its main machine gun in combat, the M240 Bravo. So we were also given tear gas, stun grenades, stun grenades that emitted not only pellets and light and a loud flash but some that did that and emitted tear gas. Tear gas canisters and grenades, pepper spray, rubber bullets for the shotguns and ample ammunition, lethal ammunition, Green Tip M855 steel penetrating ammunition.
So when we received all this equipment and we were loaded up and ready to go into Gaza, I was truly concerned as to why we were equipped so lethally if our job, our charter, was to secure, deliver and then secure the distribution of aid. We were not combatants. We were not going in to fight Hamas or provide support to the IDF.
We were supposed to not be. We were supposed to be going in as independent unilateral security contractors to secure the aid, period. And I felt that we were equipped to go into war.
Chris Hedges
And let me ask you how, because you have two subcontractors, you worked for one that provides security, with those two subcontractors, how large a force are we talking about and were they all American?
Anthony Aguilar
So, there was only one prime contract. So there were multiple subs under the prime. The prime contract was Safe Reach Solutions. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, it’s this weird cloak-and-dagger shell of an entity. It doesn’t have any agency or body to it other than Johnnie Moore, the evangelical Zionist, self-described by the way, that’s how he describes himself, John Acree, the second in charge, and then a media team.
There’s really no body to the GHF. The GHF was not in Israel or Gaza. There is no GHF in Israel or Gaza. They’re all back in the United States. The GHF was really this hands-off shell company is the best way to describe it. Safe Reach Solutions was the for-profit money-making contract entity for which all the money went into to pay for everything.
Underneath Safe Reach Solutions, you had UG Solutions for armed security that was me, that was what I worked at. You had a company called Arkel for logistics, truck drivers, maintenance, logistics. And then you had a construction company, an Israeli construction company to do the construction for the contract needs.
So in terms of who was armed, by contract, the only individuals that could be armed were the UG Solutions contractors, people like myself. Nobody else could be armed. The UG Solutions contract started with 275 armed contractors, armed in the way that I just described, every single one of us.
And an additional 48 that we received part way through because the contract for UG Solutions was supposed to be supplemented by a Ugandan militia security force that, on the 26th of May, when Jake Wood stepped down as the director of GHF, the Ugandans simultaneously stepped away.
They didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. They felt concerned as to what was really going on. So when the Ugandan militia steps away because they think that things are wrong, you got a problem. So we then had to hire 48 more people to come in on contract.
Now, however, on the 21st of August, the initial 90-day period of performance for the contract ended, and the contract was renewed. So, if you’re aware, the State Department, through USAID, gave GHF $30 million. The private donors, whom we don’t know who they are, the Western European countries that Chapin Fay from GHF has said, that won’t tell us who they are, gave another $30 million, so that upped it to $60 [million].
So that gave them the money to extend the contract through the end of December and they hired more contractors online. And the reason they did that is because now, you had mentioned in the beginning the four sites. There were only four compared to the 400 under the UN. One of those sites, the site in the north, the Netzarim Corridor site that’s near Gaza City has been shut down and turned into an IDF base. There are IDF snipers now staged at what was secure distribution site four in the north.
So you had three remaining in the south. For a good period of time, site number one was closed because they were doing construction to expand it. So you only had two sites operating in the far south. Now that they’ve expanded that site and reopened it, what the GHF is now doing is that Palestinians that come to the site, any Palestinian that came to these sites in the south, they had to cross the Morag Corridor.
The Morag Corridor is a militarized corridor that separates Central Gaza from Southern Gaza. Consider it a border, if you will. It’s a border within a border. Any civilians that crossed south of the Morag Corridor to get to the sites, mind you, in order to get to site one, two, or three, you have to cross the Morag Corridor, you must. So as soon as a Palestinian crosses the Morag Corridor, they can’t go home.
They get sent in mass droves, a death march if you will, to one of the camps — Mawasi camp, Rafah camp, Khan Yunis camp, the UN camps that were existing before the war. Now, however, starting a few days ago, when the IDF initiated Operation Gideon’s Chariots II in the north, to clear northern Gaza all the way to Erez, the border with Israel, the GHF simultaneously began Phase 3.
Phase 3 of the operation was always in the plans that all the Palestinians that are being displaced to the south now stay there in this concentration camp that was run by GHF, that is run by GHF, with armed security from GHF providing security around this encampment. So they’ve hired more. They’ve hired even more armed security now to guard this entire encampment.
And if you look at the definition of concentration and camp, and you put those two words together, it is a concentration camp without question. And that is exactly what they’re doing. The number of employees has since increased and so has the pay. They’re getting paid more now.
Chris Hedges
How much are they paid on a daily rate? Because the contractors in Iraq, and I have friends of mine who were in the military, complained about it all the time. The contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid outrageous sums of money to essentially do the work the US military was doing for a fraction of…
Anthony Aguilar
Outrageous, absurd, obnoxious amounts of money. Had I stayed there for the whole, if I had done the 90 days and they told us from the very beginning that hey, at the end of the 90 days, it’s very likely that we’re gonna get more money and we’re gonna re-up for nine more months.
So you see they’re doing it in those increments. May 17th to August 1st, September, October, November, December, ends December 31st. Calendar year, they get a new contract, boom boom boom. Had I stayed on for that entire year, I would have cleared well over a million dollars.
Chris Hedges
Wow.
Anthony Aguilar
It’s insane. So for me, I was getting paid $1,150 a day plus a $180 per diem. So $1,320 a day. That pay has now increased to where the contractors on the ground are making north of $1,500 a day, per day. So it’s an absurd amount of money.
Chris Hedges
Wow. Tony, what percentage of them are Americans? Are they mostly American veterans?
Anthony Aguilar
So the vast majority were, well I should say, everybody under contract from UG Solutions, I don’t know about Safe Reach Solutions and the truck drivers and everybody. I don’t know that composition. But I do know that under UG Solutions, we were all Americans with the exception of one individual that I knew who I believe was dual citizenship, U.S.-United Kingdom, or was from Britain and now became a US citizen.
But he was the only one that wasn’t from the United States, American. Every single contractor that was armed…
Chris Hedges
Did you have translators? Military units in Iraq and Afghanistan always traveled with translators. Did you have translators when you were there?
Anthony Aguilar
There were interpreters, translators that were hired initially on contract under UG Solutions. But there was only like, we’re gonna have four sites, so they only hired four interpreters, or four translators. That’s one translator per a site to try to communicate with upwards of 10 to 12,000 people. However, within the first couple days, those interpreters resigned.
I mean, they speak Arabic. They’re Arabic. They’re Arab primarily. The translators that we hired were individuals of Arab descent that were Muslim. And when they saw what was going on, they didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. So we really didn’t have an interpretation, linguist capability on site, which, in my opinion, greatly influenced the method of just shooting to communicate.
Chris Hedges
Let me ask, before we go into what you saw, explain for people who don’t understand what it looked like. A lot of times this food was only handed out for an hour, it was two in the morning. There were routes that Israel had set down by which people had to arrive to these sites. So you thousands of people walking through the night. I think they blow a whistle or something when you can come get the food, you can explain.
People would carry knives either to protect themselves or to steal food. It was just absolute chaos. They were funneled, I think, through gates. But explain the logistics of it, what it looked like and how it worked.
Anthony Aguilar
So I’ll use site number one as an example to walk you through this anecdote of a day in the life of distribution. So at a messaged time, there was an organization called COGAT, the [Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories]. It’s in the Israeli government, it belongs under the Ministry of Defense and it coordinates between the Ministry of Defense, the government and Gaza in terms of what happens in Gaza.
They would message to the population and I don’t know how I asked this question, how, because a lot of people in Gaza don’t have Internet apps, Wi-Fi. So when I asked about the messaging I was always told, oh it’s going out through Facebook. And I’m like, really? I don’t think that’s an effective means in this situation.
But that’s what we were told, that the messaging went out to everybody on Facebook or some other means. I just wanted to provide this for you if you can see it. [Showing map] Here’s the three sites. This is all of Gaza.
Here’s where the sites are, all the way in the south. This right here, this pink line, this is the Morag Corridor. That’s what I told you about, that bisects Southern from Central Gaza. This is the Netzarim Corridor. Right here, Netzarim Corridor North, is where Operation Gideon’s Chariots Part B or 2 is happening right now. So everybody from here is being pushed down here.
So at the time of distribution prior to the 22nd of August, if I live here in Khan Younis or Rafah or Mawasi, I get this message that site number one will be distributing at 2 a.m. I can’t drive. I have to walk and in order to come down to these sites, if I live right here for example, if I live in Deir al-Balah, if I live in this neighborhood in Deir al-Balah, I can’t just walk down to the site.
I have to go west to the coast. I have to take the coastal road, the militarized coastal road, down here to the Morag Corridor, and then walk down the Morag Corridor to the road that leads to the site that’s going to be open that day. Let’s just say in this case, like I said, site number one.
Then I get held, I wait right here. I get held right here by the Israeli army, what they call the security line, until distribution on the site is ready for distribution. And when I mean ready for distribution, I don’t mean organized in a way to give everybody a box and provide them what they need. Just in a big pile. Just in a free for all.
So when we unloaded the trucks, we would then call the IDF to say the trucks are unloaded. Or sometimes the IDF would call us and say, stop unloading. We’re going to distribute what we have to get the trucks out of there. We’re going to go with what we have whether that was half the trucks two or three.
On one day of distribution on site number two, excuse me site number three, on the 16th of July what had happened in that instance was that it was advertised that there were going to be 12 trucks going in, which would feed a magnitude of thousands.
The IDF at like the third unload of the trucks, the third truck unloaded, was like stop, there’s stuff going on, get everybody out, we’re gonna release the line now. And they did, so you have 10,000 people expecting to have 10,000 equal equivalent meals, only coming to get a thousand meals.
So that would happen frequently, this kind of a reindeer games of telling the Palestinians this site’s gonna be open and then switching the sites or distribution is gonna be at this time and then changing the time. And you can see how that can be very confusing and frustrating and cause… it was very unfair to the Palestinians.
But back to the anecdote of site one in terms of how a site works. So either at the given time or at the time that we finished unloading, whichever came first, sometimes it would take a long time to unload like if we had a trailer that broke down or a forklift that broke. So on call to the IDF, the trucks are unloaded, the IDF would then release the line, so to speak, from the Morag Corridor to whichever respective site they are going to.
And this wasn’t an organized release, it was all at once. The IDF would hold the line so to speak, so if you imagine a big crowd of people funneled into one small little route to take, they would guard that spot with two Merkava tanks. They put the Merkava tanks there. They put them in place. They would shoot at the crowd to keep them back, to keep them in order, I guess you would say.
And then at the time of distribution, they moved the tanks and eight to 10,000 people, sometimes more. On site distribution one, on 27th of May, we had over 30,000 people rushing to the site at once. That is an image that you can’t grasp and understand unless you’ve seen it. It’s out of this world. And as they’re rushing to the site, so many people are released and it’s dark, it’s pre-dawn, two in the morning. It’s still dark.
And you can see machine gun fire, tracer rounds flying into the crowd and over their heads, mortar rounds coming in and exploding, tank rounds, artillery rounds. And you can hear all the shooting. And the crowd is so big and they’re running to the site because it becomes a free for all. It becomes a fight of the fittest, a mad dash to get there.
You can feel the ground shake. There are so many people that are rushing to this site that on site you can feel the ground shaking. That’s how we would know when the line was released. You can feel it. And when they’d rush onto the site, just imagine if you will, 8 to 10,000 people rushing through an entrance that’s no wider than your garage door. Imagine thousands of people falling into a point, into an entrance that’s only about as wide as the garage door.
And as they’re coming in, the food is piled up in this giant pile and it’s a free-for-all. Never, never in my time at all four sites during all the distributions that I had done did I ever witness an armed Palestinian, rifle, pistol, some type of weapon, nor did I ever experience any hostility, confrontation, anger. I experienced a lot of gratitude. I experienced a lot of confusion.
People confused like, we traveled 12 kilometers, why is there no food? Because to your point, sir, the distribution on site number one, the third distribution that we did, the first distribution we did when we had 34,000 people coming, the only thing I was doing was worrying about how am I gonna stay alive, I wasn’t worried about much else.
But in subsequent, on this mad rush, I timed it once. I took out my phone and timer and timed it. Six minutes and 13 seconds. Six minutes and 13 seconds. 25,000 boxes gone. The rest of those people coming in, no food left. So it created a lot of confusion, but back to the point of how this works, you have everybody coming onto the site.
Fight of the fittest, get the food, get out of there. What you would typically have at the end of this mad rush were the vulnerable — women, children, pregnant women, the elderly, the handicapped, the disabled. You would see, it was heartbreaking. It was something that, amongst other things, really broke my heart when you see this large rush of people coming in and the fastest, the fittest, the strongest come in and they take all, everything’s gone and they’re out of there.
And then you see the trickling in. Small little groups, onesies and twosies of children, no more than four, of pregnant women that are emaciated. Palestinians, mothers and fathers carrying their dead family member that died of starvation, their dead family member, walking towards us in the trail of this group or individuals that were handicapped because they can’t have a vehicle, they’re dragging themselves to the site or they’re limping to the site or someone’s carrying them.
It was so heartbreaking and dehumanizing that that’s what they were putting through to get food. When distribution was over, let’s say we were going to distribute from 2 in the morning to 4 in the morning, never, never did we leave the site open the entire distribution window that we were supposed to have. We had a pre-planned distribution window, 2 to 4, as an example.
Usually within the first, like I said, six minutes sometimes, eight to eleven [minutes] was average, the food’s gone. So within the first 15 minutes the IDF are then telling us hey, close the site, get everybody off. Within 15 minutes we’re already closing the site. So it takes time to close a site because you have so many people on site that you have to move them off the site. Again thousands of people that came in through an entrance that’s no wider than your garage door on the site, now leaving from an exit that’s no wider than your garage door.
You can imagine the problem with that. So what the UG Solutions contractors inherited or adopted as a practice because the IDF said to do it, and we were never given any standard operating procedures, rules of engagement, or escalation of force measures from the company, we had no idea how to address these crowds.
So we did what the IDF told us to do. And what that was is that when the IDF said, get everybody off the site, the UG Solutions contractors would form a perimeter line, consider it like riot control in a riot, and move forward and begin pepper spray. Now I want to tell everybody about this pepper spray. This is not the key chain pepper spray you buy at the gas station that you take with you on a run to protect you if someone tries to mug you.
This pepper spray is in a canister the size of a fire extinguisher with a hose just like a fire extinguisher, that large conical flume to spread the… And that’s what UG Solutions contractors had. They just start fogging the area with pepper spray to the whole crowd. And then as you move forward, once you make contact with the crowd, you’re at the contact line, you start to lob stun grenades by the dozens.
As these stun grenades are going off and you’re spraying pepper spray and people are rushing towards the exit in confusion because they came to get food. There’s no food left, so these individuals that are left at the end are literally on their hands and knees, on their hands and knees picking up scraps of food, picking up from the dirt and putting it in a bag so they have some food to go back with.
No water, we’re providing them no water whatsoever. So just imagine that scene where you have women, children, elderly, the disabled, crawling on their hands and knees picking up food. And in the meantime, they’re getting sprayed with pepper spray and hit with stun grenades and pushed off of the site. And when they get off the site and the gates closed and they’re crammed onto this corridor of leaving, the IDF begin to shoot at them, fire at them to get them to push them north, to scare them, to control them.
So the distribution sites do not serve as a location to get food. They are traps to lure the Palestinians in to cause death, dehumanization, confusion and chaos. And as they leave, death, confusion, chaos, dehumanization. So you have, one, you gotta survive the trip. You gotta survive the walk. You gotta survive the being shot at. Then you gotta survive being on site. Then you gotta survive getting home or getting out and then you get told, you’re not going home.
So if you’re the father of a family of four and you left your site, your home to come to this site, you didn’t know you weren’t coming home. They don’t tell you that. So now here’s this father with his box of food trying to go home and they go, nope, you’re not going home. You’re going to, where are you from? You’re from Khan Younis? Okay, you’re going to the Khan Younis camp. There you go. And you never go home.
So if you survive all of that that I just mentioned, your prize at the end of that is you don’t go home. So that’s the situation they’re put in and you had mentioned, GHF sometimes harps on this and I want to make this clear, the thing with knives. The Palestinians weren’t showing up with machetes or giant tactical knives. I’m talking small kitchen knives, maybe sometimes a utility knife. Not to kill or threaten anybody but because each of the stacks of boxes that get piled up, they are wrapped, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen like that shrink wrap that they wrap boats in for the winter.
It’s a very thick, thick plastic that the stacks are wrapped in to prevent them from tilting or falling in delivery. That plastic wrapping on those boxes, you cannot tear it. You cannot rip it and tear it. I have tried. In fact, I myself, one day I was looking at one of these stacks and I was like, how do they open these? And I went and I was like, God, I can’t, I had to take out my knife. I had to take out my knife to cut in order to rip it open.
So they learned this, that hey, if you go to the site and you’re going to get food, bring a knife because you can’t get through the plastic otherwise. So they weren’t bringing knives as a threat or to threaten us. They brought them to open the plastic and there was one instance where site number one, whole bunch of people there, this young man he had a knife, it was like a paring knife in your knife set, real small.
And he was standing there next to me and he and I were trying to move this pallet so we could get to it. It was crunched in, there were pallets on top of it. So we were trying to move it out so people could access it. And he pulls out this little knife and he pulls it out and he shows it to me. He didn’t like threaten me, he showed it to me and I knew what he needed to do. So I was like, okay. He cuts down that plastic line, we tear it open. He hands me the knife and says, shukran [thank you in Arabic] and gave me the knife.
And put it back in a box. At no time did I ever experience on the sites, and again I didn’t just work site one, I worked them all, did I ever experience any threats or hostility. So that’s kind of a day in the life on a site, if you will sir.
Chris Hedges
Let me ask you to go back. You said before they are allowed to go into these kind of funnels to get there, you said they were shooting, even tank shells. Was this just Israel firing indiscriminately on the crowd? Was Israel firing in front of the crowd? What was that about?
Anthony Aguilar
Indiscriminate at times. The majority of what I saw in this indiscriminate fire was firing like so you’re in a crowd thousands deep and the front line of that thousands deep crowd has got a couple hundred people. They would fire at the front, at the feet of that front line of the crowd. [Shooting noise] And just keep raking that with fire to keep them back. They would also fire over their heads to keep them down.
They would fire into the berms along the sides or the dirt roads along the sides to keep them from spreading or water. They wanted them in this tightly controlled, small little corridor and while they were waiting, they wanted them all down on the ground. So that’s how they would keep everybody face down on the ground in these big crowds waiting until the release. So when the tanks would pull off you have all these people getting up and starting to run like the start of a hundred yard dash.
But they would often use coaxial machine gun fire from their tanks, machine gun fire that the Israeli soldiers had themselves with their machine guns. At times, main gun tank rounds from the Merkava tank.
And you know when a main gun round from the tank fires: one, it’s extremely loud. Two, when that tank round flies through the air, one, lights up because it fires at such a high intensity of heat that you can see the glow of the round. And it emits this very unique to the round itself, just like the Abrams tank that we have in the United States Army, it emits this heat signature behind it where it’s just moving so fast.
And you can see that. You can see that with the naked eye. So whenever they would fire a tank round, there was no doubt, no doubt what they were firing. Mortar rounds. I spent the early days of my military career as an infantry officer as a mortar platoon leader. I was in charge of mortars. I know what a mortar sounds like. I know what it sounds like when it fires and I know what it sounds like when it lands. And also you can see it, the mortar round.
So mortar rounds, tank rounds, machine gun fire to keep all the Palestinians at bay. The IDF made it very clear to us from the beginning because I asked that question to the leadership, why is there so much shooting? No one’s shooting back, there’s no enemy, what are you shooting at? “We shoot to communicate with the crowd. We shoot to keep the animals back.” That’s how they described it. “We shoot to keep the animals back.”
Chris Hedges
Let me talk about what you saw. You released a very chilling video of a contractor kind of bragging about, I think, shooting a young boy or something. Just a little bit about what you witnessed.
Anthony Aguilar
So the young boy Amir, he was shot and gunned down by the IDF. On another occasion at site number four on the 29th of May, I witnessed the UG Solutions contractors that were firing at an elderly gentleman that was leaving the site that he was hit. And on another occasion I saw a woman that was killed. The young boy Amir on site number three on the 28th of May was killed by the IDF.
However, he was killed by the IDF coming to one of our sites. He was rushing off the site running in panic because he had been hit with stun grenades and tear gas. So there’s complicitancy, but that incident was the IDF.
There’s multiple videos that have been released and I wanted to, you know, what’s ironic is I want to clarify that I haven’t released any of those videos or pictures to anybody. I was tasked, UG Solutions tasked me in writing, you are going to do pictures and video.
On the first day of distribution I came back and I showed the UG Solutions chief operations officer who was visiting, I showed him a picture of these very happy Palestinians and he was like that’s a great picture, send that to me, I want to capture it to put in our web page and this and that. And he was like every day you’re gonna take pictures and video, we need this, we need to capture this and I’m like all right, got it boss.
So I was tasked to take pictures and videos at the sites every day. I was tasked that when I returned back to the operations base at the end of the day, to upload all my photos and videos to a Google shared drive that UGS owned and I was further instructed that after I upload them, wipe them from my phone. That those pictures and videos were the property of UG Solutions.
Okay, so I did that. UG Solutions, on around the 10th of June, gave access to that Google Drive to an Israeli reporter. When they gave access to that reporter, they didn’t just give them access to what they needed, they gave them access to the entire Google Drive with editor rights. So that reporter took everything out of that Google Drive, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and they distributed it.
I first got contacted by the media, I didn’t contact them. They contacted me and they said, hey, we have this video and you’re in it. Is this you? And I was like, well, that’s me. So that’s how that got started. But the videos on the 28th of May, you see a video taken on site of a young boy named Amir. Would you like me to share the Amir story?
Chris Hedges
Yes, yes, please do.
Anthony Aguilar
So this young boy named Amir. That was his, it has since come out that his family is still looking for him and still searching for his body. He hasn’t been found, they don’t know his whereabouts. When he was standing there, so this is site number three on the 28th of May. You see there’s this boy here, this is Amir. You see what he’s in his hands? He doesn’t have a box of food. These are scraps that he picked up from the ground. [Showing picture]
You see back here, these are all the small group of people left at the end that are primarily women and children. You see there’s a lot of children here, right? That’s a child, that’s a child, that’s a child. Right here, that’s a child. A lot of children in the end of distribution. This young boy came up to us first, and he was talking to us, and Amir, who is back over here, walks up, and as he walked up, he extends his hand.
He came up to us and he extended his hand. The contractor that was standing next to me was approachable and you know, pretty solid dude, pretty good, an approachable person, I would say. Some of the contractors were not approachable. They would wear the balaclava covering that had like the skull face or things like that. They weren’t approachable.
This gentleman was approachable. So he comes up and Amir has his hand extended and this contractor reaches his hand out. When Amir came up to us, we thought that maybe he was asking for more food or maybe he wanted help finding his family. He was alone. He was completely alone. I had been watching him in the crowd and as he walked towards us, he was alone.
No shoes, he was alone. You could tell that he was emaciated and hungry and he just had these scraps of food that he picked up off the ground. But when he walked up to us, he didn’t ask us for more food, he didn’t tell us, he walked up to us and he said he was very hungry. He did say that. But he kisses the contractor’s hand. He kisses it and then puts it to his head and he said, shukran.
And then he was telling us, he was like, I’m very hungry, I’m very hungry. Thank you for this food, I was very hungry. And mind you, we’re not giving them meals, we’re giving them
raw ingredients to cook and we’re not giving them any water. How this young boy by himself was gonna go back and cook himself and make a fire and boil water and cook any of these items is beyond me. But he was thankful. He wanted to say thank you. He wanted to express his gratitude.
He then turns over to me and you know as we’re talking I put my right hand out to kind of pat him on the shoulder and tell him we care about you and we think it’s gonna be okay and he kissed my hand.
And we’re standing there talking to him and this boy here, Amir did not speak any English, just very broken, he knew a couple words, he knew “thank you”, he knew “hello”, but he didn’t really speak much English and we did not, I do not speak Arabic. So this this young boy here did speak a decent amount of English and this guy says to me “Your name, your name?” and I was like “Oh I’m Tony” and this little boy here, the kid in the black shirt says, “Well he is Amir, his name is Amir.”
So that’s why I refer to him as Amir, that’s the only name I knew. And the parents have said that was his nickname. So this boy must have known him, but I don’t know. As he then walked away to go back to the crowd, the IDF called us on the radio and said, get everybody off the site. Get everybody off the site. We’re going to come through with a tank. We have an operation going on. Get everybody off the site.
So we were telling them, it’s time to go home. It’s time to go home. And then the UG Solutions contractors initiate with the pepper spray, the stun grenades, and this crowd is panicking. And they go towards the exit. And as they’re funneling towards the exit, each of the sites is designed somewhat differently. Each site has nuances to where they are because of where the IDF… All four sites, now only three, are co-located with an IDF combat unit.
So if there’s a site, there’s an IDF combat unit right next to it. So site number three, which was in the area of [inaudible], Southern Khan Younis, there’s a neighborhood called [inaudible] that used to be there, it’s gone now. But that’s what the IDF called site number three was [inaudible].
So as you can see here, here’s where they are on the site. This area is where we did distribution. Right about here is where I had that conversation with Amir, you see in the video. They were then pushed out to go and exit the site here. This is the exit. You see how I told you in the beginning how the entrance and the exit converge at one point? And this right here is the, where my pen would be, is the Morag Corridor that takes them back towards the coast.
So you see on this site this day, you had people still trying to come in and we closed the gates. So you had this entire area backed with thousands of people. At the same time, we’re pushing people out and we closed the gates. So now you have people standing here thinking they’re coming in and you have people that are going out who are trying to get out. And right here, you have this giant traffic jam of human beings.
Here at the site where they were exiting, you see this berm right here? This is a berm. This is about a 20 foot high berm. Right here, this is an Israeli base. See how close it is? This right here is the Israeli artillery unit.
This right here, at the end of this position right here, this is the road that we would take to come into the site. This road right here, we would drive in from the south, and this is the road that we would take to come into the site. Right here, at this corner, was an Israeli tank. It sat there every day. Every day. So when, excuse me, there was a tank that sat here. You have a tank unit.
And then you have another tank that was positioned right here. If you can see that, that there, that’s a tank position, it’s built up to be a tank position and the tank would sit right here. So as people are leaving this guy in this tank can’t see anything beyond this point because of this berm. He can’t see over here. He, at this tank, is shooting at this crowd of people to get them to keep moving.
And if anybody has seen the interview I did with the BBC with Jeremy Bowen, he opens it up with the, “this may look like a combat scene, but it’s not, it’s a distribution site,” and you see the bullets flying in, you see hundreds of people on the ground. That video is filmed from right here. That is this spot right here.
So as the last group of people are leaving, Amir and others, are leaving out of the gate, this guy that’s shooting can’t see them. Can’t see them. So as they’re running and they get to this side, down the road, they’re running directly into this hail of gunfire. If this guy in this tank here is shooting here and he can’t see here, when these people are running out, they ran right into this hail of gunfire.
And they dropped to the ground. Some were hit and you could see them crawling. You could see the blood. Some jumped into the berm. There was a berm there. And Amir went down about right here and you can’t really tell in great detail because of this imagery but along both sides of these roads that were carved into the ground there’s these little ditches. They would grind it out, put the dirt out. So have these small ditches.
So at this point when the gunfire broke out I didn’t know what was going on. I was over here on the site. So I walked up to this, this is a 20 foot high berm. I went up to the top of the berm. couldn’t go any further beyond the berm because the entire perimeter is wrapped in razor wire. So I couldn’t go beyond it. But I’m standing right here. I’m standing on top of this berm looking. I can see all of this. I can see everything.
I can’t see to the other side of this berm, but I can see all of this from where I’m standing. And where the people were being shot at was right here. And Amir went down about right there. And he never got up. The shooting occurred. There were dead bodies. People were left for dead. He never got up. So for all intents and purposes, and when I saw the shooting happen…
When someone is getting shot at and they jump to the ground or they try to get out of the way, it looks much different than when someone is shot. And I know, one, I know the way the body reacts when it gets shot because I’ve been shot. It’s not like in the movies where a guy gets shot and he’s like, I mean you get hit and you go down.
This guy, this little child was hit and dropped to the ground. There was no moving. Drops to the ground, the things he had in his hand spilled onto the floor and he’s lying in this ditch and he didn’t move. The IDF killed him. But the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the UG Solutions contractors, they played their part. And the story of Amir, this is not just the story of Amir. That’s one incident out of thousands.
[Showing images of Palestinians] There’s her story. There’s his story. There’s his story. There’s his story. You know, there’s her story. There’s his story. What happened to Amir has happened to thousands of Palestinians. Women, children, men, elderly, young. Thousands are killed around these sites because of that exact methodology that I just described.
Chris Hedges
And it’s not just the Israelis. The security forces for the GHF have also fired on Palestinians.
Anthony Aguilar
Yes, sir, so that takes us to the 29th of May, site number four the video of the “Woohoo! I think you got one!” There was that incident. I can explain that if you’d like.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, right. Sure, let’s close with that and then I just have one final question after that.
Anthony Aguilar
Okay. So site number four, when it was open, it’s no longer open. Site number four was up here. So, here’s the three sites that are currently open. Site number four was way up here. At site number four, there was an IDF tank unit co-located with it.
On that same day when all of the Palestinians had left the site and we closed the gates, here’s the entrance, here’s the exit. So we closed the gate. And you see the video that opens up. In that video, I’m standing right here. You see when the video starts, there’s a berm. That’s this berm. And I’m standing right here looking out the exit.
The individual that was shooting was on this berm right here. He was on top of the berm, not down on the berm, not over here. He was on top of the berm and he was shooting here towards the crowd that was leaving, the crowd was leaving the site. This guy up here was shooting over here. You can hear it very clearly. And he goes, yeah, or woohoo.
The guy that responds in the video that says, “I think you got one” in that video, that guy that says, I think you got one is standing right here at the exit. I’m standing right here. I’m looking at the same thing he’s looking at. A man dropped to the ground. This contractor then says, “I think you got one.” This contractor standing here that was shooting responds with, “hell yeah, boy.”
And they killed a man. Not the IDF, not Hamas, a UG Solutions contractor, an American contractor in Gaza on a tourist visa, killed an unarmed civilian who was not posing a threat. He was leaving the site. He was going back home. His back was turned to us. He was leaving.
That’s the dehumanization in what’s going on. And from these two small anecdotes that I’ve shared, magnify that by thousands. And that’s what happens every day in Gaza.
Chris Hedges
Let me ask you, Tony, just to close. There’s an article that I read in the Middle East Eye, and I just wondered if you could comment on it.
“US contractors at a Gaza aid centre interrogated a source of Middle East Eye journalist Mohamed Salama seeking information about his identity and whereabouts before he was killed, [MEE can reveal.]
Salama was killed alongside MEE reporter Ahmed Abu Aziz and three other journalists [on Monday morning] as they responded to an attack on Nasser hospital in [southern Gaza’s] Khan Younis. The two strikes killed 20 Palestinians [overall, including medics and first responders.]
Days before, a source for one of Salama’s major investigations for MEE told him that they had been briefly detained at an aid distribution centre by US security contractors guarding the site.
There, the source said, they had been interrogated about the identity of the reporter behind the story.”
And essentially the article goes on to argue that after that interrogation that information was passed on to Israel on the identity of the journalist. Just if you could comment on that story.
Anthony Aguilar
That story shocked me for many reasons. One, it shocked me that it happened at all. The continued pattern of the IDF killing journalists is, this is something that the world should be afraid of. The most threatening weapon to the IDF is a camera.
So there’s that aspect of it. But then again, the Middle Eastern Eye are the ones that initially broke the follow-up story from Amir in trying to identify his family. That reporter that’s identified in that article was the reporter that I had been communicating with who had identified the mother, Amir’s mother, who’s been looking for his body since the 28th of May.
No one’s seen him since the 28th of May. So that kind of hit home to me also because that reporter, one of the stories that he had been working on was locating Amir’s family, trying to figure out, bring closure. So that hit very close to home. I communicated with that reporter.
I also know as a fact that what they would call temporary detention or temporary holding. It’s kind of like with the police if you’re, you know, am I under arrest? No, you’re being detained. It’s like okay well you’re putting handcuffs on me so you’re arresting me.
In that type of situation they are detained and they’re held for questioning at the sites. On each site, there are six cameras on every site. So if like this is a site, there’s a camera one, two, three, four, five, six. There’s six cameras on every site. One of those cameras is entirely dedicated to analytics, biometrics, facial recognition. These cameras all feed into a screen back in the main control center in Kerem Shalom, where the joint tactical operations, you got SRS [Safe Reach Solutions], UG [Solutions], and the IDF.
The IDF have a 24-7 permanent presence in the GHF operations center. They are there. They have an intel analyst, they have a targeteer, a guy that drops bombs out of a drone, they have a senior officer liaison, and they have this little cell that works hand-in-hand with SRS and UG Solutions. I know this because I was one of those UG Solutions contractors in that operations center that daily worked with these guys.
So I know exactly what they do and they’re there 24-7. So in this operation center you have SRS-employed former military intelligence analysts. Not data collectors, not information collectors, intelligence analysts that sit there and their whole job during that entire shift that they have, that 12 hour shift, is to watch the cameras on site, specifically the analytics camera, and build this database of facial recognition personnel.
Who does that database go to? It goes to the IDF. They control it. As days went on with more and more data collection, building this database of facial recognition, the IDF would tell us on a normal basis, have your security men hold that man, hold that man there. Because when you’re looking at this crowd of people on the analytics camera, there’s all these little boxes. I don’t know you’ve ever seen facial recognition, but there’s all these boxes looking at the faces.
What that intel analyst was doing in the days prior and still ongoing is building a database of POIs, or persons of interest. So if one of those persons of interest would then later be back at the site again, their box on their little screen would be red. So you would know, like, person of interest number 4I8923 is here. And you’d look at him.
And it always struck me as odd because there was no qualification, characterization, or reason for where someone was a person of interest other than if they were military-aged, if they were a male, and if they “looked like they could become Hamas”. Really? Like, it’s so amateur, but anyway, the reporters, people that were reporters, were often some of the first that were put that person on the persons of interest list.
So back to this interrogation that occurred on the scene. That happened on site number three. I know it happened on site number three because days before that, that reporter and I, through an NGO [Non-Governmental Organization], we’re supposed to have a meeting so that I could talk to the mother. I’ve talked to the mother once before, but we were going to talk again because she wanted to see some pictures and video that I had of Amir because she hadn’t seen those yet.
That meeting that I was supposed to have was delayed or now it’s not happening because no one could find him. No one could find the reporter. So where that happened, where that interrogation, that questioning happened was at site number three, south in Khan Younis, site number three, the [inaudible] site that I just told you about where Amir was killed.
Site number three, just south of Nasser Hospital, that same area. So when you look at how the IDF are systematically targeting journalists, targeting anybody that they feel looks like Hamas, they’re doing it based on the data collection, the intelligence collection that GHF is providing to them.
Why, as a humanitarian relief effort, do you need to spend thousands of dollars on hiring intelligence analysts and biometric data collection cameras on site? Why would you need that if you’re doing humanitarian assistance? You don’t, unless you’re doing something else.
Chris Hedges
Great, thank you Tony. And I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Sofia [Menemenlis] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Photos
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TOPSHOT – A flame is seen as Israeli mobile artillery cannon fires 155mm shell towards the Gaza Strip at a position near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, just outside the northern Gaza Strip, 29 June 2006. (Photo by GALI TIBBON / AFP) (Photo by GALI TIBBON/AFP via Getty Images)
Tests On Facial Recognition Technology Begun At Berlin Suedkreuz
BERLIN, GERMANY – AUGUST 03: Passersby walk under a surveillance camera which is part of facial recognition technology test at Berlin Suedkreuz station on August 3, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. The technology is claimed could track terror suspects and help prevent future attacks. (Photo by Steffi Loos/Getty Images)
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