July 31, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:25:26
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Mr. Aguilar, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| Before I ask you any questions, I want to read what I think is your biography or parts of it because I want the audience to understand who you are. | ||
| And so I'm going to read this and you tell me if I've gotten anything wrong. | ||
| So you're a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. | ||
| You went to West Point. | ||
| You got your commission in the Army straight out of West Point. | ||
| You served for 25 years in the U.S. Army as a combat infantry officer in a special forces, a green beret officer. | ||
| You were deployed 12 times to Iraq three times, Afghanistan three times. | ||
| You were deployed to Syria, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Jordan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. | ||
| You saw combat in many of those venues. | ||
| You're highly decorated. | ||
| You were wounded in combat, received your Purple Heart. | ||
| You got a Bronze Star for Valor in combat, an Army Commendation Medal for Valor in Combat. | ||
| And then earlier this year, you found yourself working in Gaza under GHF, and I'll ask you to explain what that is in a moment. | ||
| You were in Gaza from the 17th of May this year, 2025, through June 26th, 2025, which was last month. | ||
| Is all of that correct? | ||
| That is correct, sir. | ||
| And the reason that I wanted to establish that before you tell the story that you're going to tell us is because very, very few Americans have been in Gaza in the last couple of years. | ||
| And I don't know any others who have the experience in chaotic situations and combat situations that you have who've been there. | ||
| And I think that really matters. | ||
| Anyone who's been around combat knows it's enormously confusing. | ||
| And having 25 years of experience around violence, I think gives you greater credibility because it suggests you can interpret what's happening accurately in a way that people who haven't had that experience probably can't. | ||
| So with that, I want to ask you the first and most obvious question. | ||
| What is GHF in Gaza? | ||
| So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was established to take over the aid distribution into Gaza, replacing the former United Nations aid delivery mechanism post-blocking or cutting off of the Gaza enclave. | ||
| So there was no aid going in up until May 26th when we started operations. | ||
| And the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was established to lead that effort overall. | ||
| So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, I'm not sure in terms of what their actual status is in terms of a company or an NGO or a nonprofit. | ||
| I don't know what they're classified as, but I know that their GHF is the overall lead for both of the contract mechanisms in Gaza. | ||
| So after 25 years as a U.S. Army officer, West Point graduate, Special Forces officer, all these combat deployments, all the decorations that you received, how did you wind up distributing aid in Gaza? | ||
| Well, sir, on May 13th, I received a phone call from the UG Solutions. | ||
| UG Solutions is a subcontract for the security portion of this aid distribution method. | ||
| They're stationed here in Davidson, North Carolina, where I live. | ||
| I retired out of Fort Bragg, and they contacted me basically looking for experienced, recently retired or recently gotten out of the military, experienced combat veterans, special forces operations background. | ||
| So they contacted me and explained the mission to me. | ||
| Up until that point, until I got that phone call, I was not aware of what UG Solutions or the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was. | ||
| So I was interested and I listened to what they had to say. | ||
| The reason I'm asking you this is I know that after this interview airs, there will be a concerted attempt to discredit you as a man. | ||
| And I'm certain, having seen this happen many times, that one of the criticisms we levy against you is that you were some sort of political activist with a political axe to grind or an ideological axe to grind. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Because it sounds like from the story you're telling now that you were a retired army officer who received a call because of your combat experience. | ||
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Is that correct? | |
| Prior to that phone call on the 13th of May, sir, and remind you, I did retire on the 1st of January. | ||
| I didn't retire years ago. | ||
| Retired been through the 1st of January. | ||
| My last day in the Army was one March. | ||
| I was very happy and content. | ||
| My wife also served a career in the military. | ||
| She is a retired career military officer. | ||
| Between the two of us, we have 45 years of service. | ||
| Between her and I, with my son, we've missed almost every birthday, every anniversary, every Christmas from the time that he was born to the majority of our marriage. | ||
| And we're still married 17 years later. | ||
| So I was very much comfortable and established in my retirement lifestyle. | ||
| No political aspirations, no aspirations to go into another line of work. | ||
| I'm starting school in the fall. | ||
| That was my aspiration. | ||
| I enjoyed making breakfast for my family, taking my son to school every morning, Boy Scout meetings, PTO meetings, watching the Golden Girls in the afternoon with a cup of tea, walking the dog. | ||
| That was my life, and I was very content. | ||
| When I got the phone call, I felt that initially because I didn't know much about the situation. | ||
| When they first called me, I said, hey, I'd like to take a day to kind of do my own research and just kind of understand what it's all about. | ||
| My answer is not no, but my answer is not yes. | ||
| So I took the day, I took the rest of the day, I believe it was a Wednesday, and I went through the, you know, I started to read about GHF, not a lot out there. | ||
| I started to read about Safe Reach Solutions, which is the prime contract, not a lot out there. | ||
| I read a little bit about UG Solutions. | ||
| UG Solutions had been the contract that sent contractors into Gaza in late January through March to control the Netsarim checkpoint once the ceasefire broke, or the ceasefire started, I should say, for the Palestinians that were allowed to then go back into Gaza City. | ||
| So they had some credibility. | ||
| It seemed like not many people had done contracts in Gaza. | ||
| UGS did. | ||
| So I figured that this would be an opportunity to link up with a company that had the experience. | ||
| But I was more interested in the mission. | ||
| I say this again, and I've said it again. | ||
| I don't know Johnny Moore, the director or CEO or whatever the title is of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. | ||
| But there is something that he said that I do agree with, that there's nothing more Christian than feeding people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And in terms of the sentiment of doing goodwill, feeding starving people, I served for the majority of my career after being an infantry officer and going to special forces. | ||
| The special forces motto, as you see in the picture behind me of First Special Forces Group, is de opreso liber, to free the oppressed. | ||
| That is our motto. | ||
| I don't just, I just didn't have that on my uniform. | ||
| I live that. | ||
| The civilian population in Gaza, politics aside, political views, religious positions aside, they are being oppressed. | ||
| Food, water, education, life, dignity. | ||
| And I wanted to be a part of going in to help in some way. | ||
| So I have no political aspirations. | ||
| I have no political leanings. | ||
| I have no desire to write a book or before doing these interviews. | ||
| I don't even have social media and I've never really been out on the internet. | ||
| This is all very overwhelming for me. | ||
| But my wife was a big factor behind me going on the record. | ||
| My wife being, again, a retired military officer, we understand a lot of the same values. | ||
| And she explained to me, she said, you know, no one else can tell this story. | ||
| No one else was there. | ||
| Not only were you there, you were on the sites and no one else saw it through the eyes of your experience. | ||
| In the places you've been, in the places you've, in the things that you've done, the lens you look at this through is different than most people have. | ||
| You need to go on the record. | ||
| The American people need to know this. | ||
| My motivations in this are patriotic. | ||
| I want to inform the American people, my fellow citizens, of what's going on in Gaza, what our taxpayers' dollars are funding, and what American citizens on the ground are being faced with. | ||
| America needs to know. | ||
| So tell us what you saw. | ||
| And I'm grateful to your wife for her encouragement on that. | ||
| I think she's absolutely right. | ||
| The United States is paying for this. | ||
| And there is almost no information coming out of Gaza. | ||
| The news media, of course, are barred. | ||
| It's been going on for more than a couple of years now. | ||
| It'll be three years in October. | ||
| And the sense is that there's something profound going on, but of course, there's no way to know what's going on. | ||
| So what did you see when you arrived? | ||
| What were your perceptions of Gaza? | ||
| So my initial perceptions of Gaza, just in terms of the physical aspects, is that I would just describe it as post-apocalyptic, something from akin to Terminator 2 when the T-100s are walking through the destroyed landscape. | ||
| It's human depravity. | ||
| It's the oppression of dignity. | ||
| It's the entire area. | ||
| For example, in the south in Rafah, I saw pictures of Rafa prior to the current war. | ||
| And there were nice buildings, there were beach resorts, there were street lights and neighborhoods. | ||
| And now it is leveled to the ground. | ||
| There is not a building that stands. | ||
| And the rubble is piled up. | ||
| And as you drive through Rafa to one of our points, secure distribution site number three was in Rafah. | ||
| So we would have to drive through the old southern Rafah corridor to get there. | ||
| And all of the homes just in piles and rubble. | ||
| And you can see someone's couch that's hanging from a piece of rebar out of the second floor of a building or a refrigerator smashed or family photos that were on the wall that are now shattered and broken. | ||
| These lives were just destroyed and taken. | ||
| And that's the scene of Gaza. | ||
| On the news, airdrops were conducted over the last 48 hours and journalists were prohibited or encouraged not to take video or pictures of the overhead scenery. | ||
| Because if the world sees that, I think the world would step back and pause to say, what are we doing? | ||
| What have we become? | ||
| You've spent your life in combat zones. | ||
| That's why I think your testimony is so compelling, because you have a frame of reference. | ||
| You've seen a lot of destruction and a lot of killing in your life for 25 years. | ||
| How would you compare what you saw in Gaza to what you've seen in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq? | ||
| Nothing compares. | ||
| Nothing I have seen in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Baghdad, in Mosul, Sadr City, all throughout Afghanistan, Syria, the southern Philippines, some places where there's dense populations. | ||
| I have never witnessed anything as brutal, destructive, violent. | ||
| And I would say that steps far over our international laws of how we persecute wars and how we engage in warfare. | ||
| We've long departed from that standard. | ||
| And America is a part of it. | ||
| How is it obvious that America is a part of it? | ||
| I know that we know academically the United States is paying for this and has always paid for it. | ||
| But do you see American weapons? | ||
| Do you see American military personnel? | ||
| How enmeshed in this are we? | ||
| So the 314 government contractors under UG Solutions, the majority, not all of them, but in the high 80 percentile are combat veterans from the military, directly from the military combat veterans like myself. | ||
| You have a mix of law enforcement. | ||
| You have a mix of people that had experience in various security backgrounds. | ||
| Within that military portion, there's a good portion of them that are special operations, Marine Corps, Navy SEALs, Green Berets. | ||
| So all of the contractors on the ground are Americans. | ||
| And the interesting part of that is that when we first entered Israel, I kind of had to take a pause and I was like, are you kidding? | ||
| we were all, we were, and are, we are in Israel, armed with fully automatic weapons and pistols and shotguns and stun grenades and machine guns, going into Gaza on a tourist visa. | ||
| We are there on a tourist visa. | ||
| So, if my grandmother wanted to go visit Jerusalem, she would be in Israel under the same status that I was. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| At first, I didn't understand it, but then I went and I did some research as to why didn't we do a B1 entry visa as subject matter experts invited by the government or under a different authority? | ||
| There's various entry visa options. | ||
| And it dawned on me that, oh, well, if you want to submit for a form of B1 or a different form of the B2 under a work visa, one, that's expensive. | ||
| And two, that takes time. | ||
| You have to coordinate that ahead of time. | ||
| And this mission was thrown together. | ||
| And there's no one within SRS or UG Solutions that will push back against this because we all know it. | ||
| It was thrown together very hastily. | ||
| And it was just kind of a mix of throwing so many parts together, trying to get it all to come together that I think things were done to be fast, fast and loose, as I would call it. | ||
| And one of those was, hey, go online, fill out your Israeli visa, get your e-visa, tourist visa, $25, and come on over to Israel. | ||
| You said all of the contractors are American. | ||
| The Israeli military, the IDF, leveled Gaza. | ||
| Are there any Israelis helping to feed or take care of, sustain the life of the Palestinians? | ||
| Or is it all Americans who are helping? | ||
| So this is what was another aspect that was both interesting and concerning to me that, and I raised this issue early on because, you know, when I use the term war crimes, people think that, oh, you're just exaggerating. | ||
| Well, I'm well versed in the protocols of the Geneva Convention, the protocols of the laws of armed conflict, the protocols of international humanitarian law, because I had to know those things as an officer leading men in combat. | ||
| I didn't have the option. | ||
| Ignorance was not an option. | ||
| So some of the things, now I don't have it, you know, memorized, but there's some pretty key elements in it that kind of stand out. | ||
| Like I don't know every word to the constitution, but I can recite the preamble. | ||
| So I know what some of them are in terms of like what like what the don'ts are. | ||
| One thing that struck me as concerning is that there are only four secure distribution sites in Gaza under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. | ||
| Four. | ||
| Prior to the blockade and prior to the stopping of UN aid going in, there were 400. | ||
| So out of the four sites that we have, only four, three of them are co-located within 150 to 200 meters from each other, all of them in the far southwest corner of the enclave near the Egyptian border. | ||
| It's nowhere near the people that need it. | ||
| North of the Netzarim corridor, which bisects central Gaza from the north, in the north, you have Gaza City and Jabalia. | ||
| That is where the population right now is the most vulnerable, where you have death, starvation. | ||
| They're isolated. | ||
| No aid is going into there, and there's no aid sites there. | ||
| So prior to us deploying, you know, as a prudent military planner mindset, you know, I'm not in the army anymore, but I didn't, you know, I still carry the skills. | ||
| I did a little bit, what I would call operational preparation in the environment. | ||
| I did my research, looked at Gaza, figured out the population, where the population centers were, what people ate, where they primarily lived and what they did. | ||
| And I saw that, okay, well, the entire northern enclave of Gaza is cut off and isolated, and none of the sites that we've put in are in that area. | ||
| So who are we providing aid to? | ||
| So the three sites out of the four that are all the way down in the southern tip of the enclave, all of them are co-located or co-nearly located with an IDF combat unit. | ||
| In that area is where the IDF is actively conducting. | ||
| And this is not an opinion that anybody can refute. | ||
| This is a fact. | ||
| You can look it up. | ||
| The IDF is currently conducting Operation Gideon's Chariots. | ||
| It's an offensive operation. | ||
| It's not a defensive. | ||
| It's not a security. | ||
| It's not an aid operation. | ||
| It is an offensive combat operation. | ||
| And they are conducting that in the south where all three out of the three or four sites are located. | ||
| We established secure distribution sites to deliver and distribute humanitarian aid, not only co-located with Israeli combat units, but located in an active combat zone. | ||
| I can't make it clearer to the leadership there and to the lawyers that I've spoke with at GHF and UG Solutions that that is a war crime, verbatim, out of the protocols of the Geneva Convention, which last time I checked, the United States was still a signatory to, and the laws of international laws and international humanitarian law. | ||
| Clearly, there's no question about it. | ||
| So to say that, well, it's okay in this one instance, it's not. | ||
| It's not okay. | ||
| So just from immediately being there, I realized that the planning and the coordination for this operation had either been done by people that had no idea, no concept of planning at that level to take into all the considerations that you have to take into an environment like this. | ||
| You can't just go into a mission like this and say, oh, we'll just wing it. | ||
| You have to consider the legal, the political, the environmental, the cultural, the military aspects. | ||
| You have to consider every aspect when you go into planning something like this. | ||
| And it was obvious that that had not been done. | ||
| So in my mind, I was like, this is either complete ignorance or it's intentional. | ||
| They were intentionally put here. | ||
| So I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Someday that's going to come out when the truth breaks and the international community looks and opens this box and starts digging into this nasty problem. | ||
| The truth will come out. | ||
| So it's my hope that we didn't do that intentionally because that would not only make us war criminals, that would just make us evil. | ||
| So, but the fact still remains. | ||
| Three of the four distribution sites are in an active combat zone. | ||
| The fourth site up in central Gaza near the Nesarene corridor is co-located with an Israeli combat unit, a tank unit, mind you, in Markaba Tank Company is located adjacent to the distribution site. | ||
| So if someone were to look through the annals of history and see how the United States government participated in the distribution of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, and they look at the maps and they're looking at everything, they're like, what was going on here? | ||
| Why are you distributing humanitarian aid in the middle of a combat zone? | ||
| It's a question that needs to be asked and needs to be answered, I think. | ||
| Do you have any sense of what the current population of Gaza is? | ||
| Which is another way of asking how many people have been killed? | ||
| How many Palestinians have died in Gaza? | ||
| Do we know? | ||
| Well, I don't think anyone has a firm number that we can all collectively trust. | ||
| I know that the Gaza Health Ministry has a number. | ||
| I mean, I haven't been able to validate or verify that, but I know that one thing I can tell you for a fact is that people have been killed. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| It's a fact. | ||
| People have been killed. | ||
| What the current population is now, I know that prior to the blockade, kind of the last census for Gaza that was taken in I believe 2018, the population was declared to be around 2.2, 2.21 million. | ||
| What it is now, I don't know, but I would assume that the population has been greatly decreased. | ||
| What I do know about the population outside of the demographics of the size is that the majority, a far majority of the population is completely isolated from the central southern portion of Gaza, and they are completely isolated in the south or excuse me, in the north, north of the Nasserine corridor in Gaza City. | ||
| So that would be if you took everybody in New York and crammed them into this to southern Manhattan and said, that's the only place you can be out of all New York City. | ||
| It's a nightmare. | ||
| And I don't know why. | ||
| Well, you know, to be fair, I do know why it's happening. | ||
| I don't know why we're accepting it. | ||
| I don't know why we're a part of it because it's a war crime to do that. | ||
| It is a war crime to intentionally displace the civilian population on the battlefield in combat operations. | ||
| What is displacement? | ||
| Well, moving people from where they live to a place that they don't and not letting them go back. | ||
| It's in the fourth protocol, the Geneva Convention, and we just turn a blind eye to it. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| I mean, Netanyahu himself has said it. | ||
| Yesterday, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation did a press conference where they even introduced it as, we are feeding the starving and displaced population of Gaza. | ||
| Okay, thank you, Chape and Faye. | ||
| You just admitted to a war crime. | ||
| You're displacing the population. | ||
| I mean, it's, these aren't rules that Tony Aguilar wrote. | ||
| These are rules that the international community wrote and agreed to. | ||
| And we're not following them. | ||
| Now, what the IDF does, is that on us per se? | ||
| At the strategic level, I think it would be as one of our allies. | ||
| But at the ground level, maybe it's not. | ||
| But we are definitely complicit in this ongoing operation. | ||
| And when the world looks, look what's happened in the last couple of days. | ||
| France is going to recognize them. | ||
| Canada is going to recognize them. | ||
| The United Kingdom is about to recognize them. | ||
| The reasons why and the politics aside, the fact that they're going to do that is a fact. | ||
| That is a reality. | ||
| So the world is going to become far, far more interested in what's going on because I think the world has taken the blinders off to now look, okay, maybe it's not as bad as the far left says, or it's not as good as the far right says, but something's going on here. | ||
| Like something stinks in Mudville. | ||
| Like we got to take a look at this. | ||
| And when they look at it and they open that box, the IDF, the Israeli government with hands in the air, they're going to go, wasn't us. | ||
| America helped us do it. | ||
| It's their money. | ||
| And then the world's going to say, what say you, America? | ||
| And right now, we do not have a good answer for that. | ||
| And if we're going to bank on, oh, well, we didn't know, or we just did what the IDF did, shame on us. | ||
| Shame on us. | ||
| That is not the American way. | ||
| Those aren't American values. | ||
| We don't kowtow to somebody else's standards. | ||
| We set the standard. | ||
| Thank you, Colonel, for doing this interview. | ||
| How are people eating in the North? | ||
| If there's one distribution center in the middle of a combat zone and the majority, you say you think the majority or certainly a big chunk of the population is in the north or central Gaza, northern Gaza. | ||
| How are they eating? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is the Israeli government bringing food in? | ||
| I do know that within the Israeli government, there's an organization called COGAT. | ||
| It's at the government ministerial level that includes, it would be, I would compare it to what like USAID was if USAID belonged to the Ministry of Defense or the Department of Defense, like militarized aid type of thing or militarized humanitarian assistance. | ||
| That's how I would describe it. | ||
| But it's an organization called COGAT, C-O-T-A-G. | ||
| It's an acronym. | ||
| I can't recall it off the top of my head because I didn't have much interaction with them. | ||
| But I know that COGAT does coordinate for the IDF. | ||
| So not the UN escorted by the IDF, not the IDF escorting us, but escorts humanitarian aid trucks that we provide, GHF trucks. | ||
| We will provide some to the Israelis to drive into certain areas of the central corridor. | ||
| In my time there, until recently, until like just the last couple of days when the UN trucks were allowed to Go into the north. | ||
| So, when you see the trucks on the news that are being swarmed with thousands of people, that's not in the south by the three distribution sites or central Gaza. | ||
| That's north of the Nesarene corridor. | ||
| So, those trucks aren't coming in from the Egyptian border going all the way up and they're getting just attacked all the way. | ||
| They're going directly into the heart of darkness. | ||
| They're going through the Erez crossing, which is the Israeli Gaza crossing to the north, and they're going directly in with aid to a starving population that hasn't had any food for months. | ||
| So, what they're eating, what they have been eating, I don't know. | ||
| And I think that when with the UN going back in there and with the international community going back in there, we're going to find some things that it's not going to be pretty. | ||
| I mean, that reckoning is coming. | ||
| The people in the northern portion alone, I know, are facing mass starvation. | ||
| Now, I'm not educated in humanitarian assistance or world food program in terms of what declares a technical state of famine. | ||
| I know there's like a certain level of not eating for a certain amount of days within a population that equals famine. | ||
| So I don't know if I could technically call it a famine because I don't know what those rules are, but I would call it starvation. | ||
| So when, and I'm glad, I'm glad that the president of the United States came out last week or excuse me, yesterday on Politico and other outlets and said that he acknowledges and recognizes the starvation in Gaza. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. President. | ||
| That is exactly what's going on. | ||
| The narrative of there's no starvation and there's no hunger going on in Gaza, that is negligent. | ||
| That is shameful that anybody would say that. | ||
| Not only is it evident to the world, I've seen it. | ||
| So if you don't trust doctors and lawyers and aid workers and NGOs and Europeans and Westerners and Middle Easterners and all these people all over the world, Asians, everybody that's been in there that has seen this problem set, if you don't believe them, you can believe me. | ||
| I'm an American. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| I have no agenda in this. | ||
| I witnessed Palestinian parents, men and women, mothers and fathers carrying their dead children in their arms, skeletons. | ||
| I witnessed that. | ||
| I've witnessed people that have come onto the sites that you can see that they are just completely emaciated and starving. | ||
| That's not fake. | ||
| So if the deniers want to think that we got Stanley Kubrick to go into Gaza and take a bunch of crisis actors and shoot a film on, you know, to fake this starvation, but it's real. | ||
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And people are dying. | |
| At this point right now, because we, the United States, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, put up our hand and said, we'll do it. | ||
| The starvation at this point has gotten worse than it was before because the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's process is leading to that starvation because it's not delivering enough aid, not even nearly enough, not even nearly to be a fraction of enough. | ||
| And I've got those numbers quick to talk about if you'd like, but it's shocking when you hear the numbers. | ||
| I would. | ||
| I would. | ||
| And I would be interested at some point to learn a lot more about this foundation, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. | ||
| I would too. | ||
| I think the world would like to know more about the foundation. | ||
| The man who runs it, who is a prominent Christian Zionist, I don't think he has a background in aid distribution. | ||
| He strikes me from reading about him as a political figure. | ||
| So I'm a little bit confused by this, but it sounds like we all have reason to be alarmed by it. | ||
| So if you could proceed with those notes. | ||
| We should be alarmed by it. | ||
| Grateful. | ||
| I'd feel safer. | ||
| I'd be safer grading a driving test by Ray Charles than listening to Johnny Moore talk about humanitarian assistance. | ||
| He has no background in there. | ||
| Have you met Johnny Moore? | ||
| I'm sorry to laugh. | ||
| Have you met Johnny Moore? | ||
| I have not sat down and had coffee with the man. | ||
| I saw him when he came to the main control center in Gaza to visit and then go out on a little photo op to site one. | ||
| So they brought him in under heavily armed security. | ||
| It's like kind of one of the things when the in-laws visit, you put out the good towels. | ||
| So, you know, when Johnny Moore visits, you know, you roll out the red carpet. | ||
| So of course, when he gets there, everything's great. | ||
| Everything's spick and span. | ||
| But what's funny is that it wasn't spick and span because while he was there and another of the supporters that they brought in, Lieutenant Colonel, British Army, I don't know him. | ||
| I've never met him, but I've seen some of his interviews on site. | ||
| As he's standing there talking, you can hear machine gun fire in the background. | ||
| I mean, it's akin to Baghdad Bob in 2003 proclaiming on CNN that there are no Americans in Baghdad as an M1 Abrams tank rolls right behind him. | ||
| There are no Americans in Baghdad. | ||
| And then Abram's tank from the third ID comes right behind him. | ||
| And he looks back and he's like, okay, there are some Americans in Baghdad. | ||
| Like, that's like, that's like what this is right now. | ||
| It's like, no one's starving in Gaza. | ||
| Well, that person looks like they're starving. | ||
| Okay, there's some people starving in Gaza. | ||
| It's like, when is America going to wake up to the garbage? | ||
| This is real. | ||
| Like, people are dying. | ||
| So, yeah, I'd love to know more about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. | ||
| Not a lot of people can figure anything out. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| And the thing is, is that not revealing your sources, not revealing who you are, not revealing where your income comes from, not revealing who your backers are, not revealing what you do, not providing in your reports, not providing reporters, not allowing reporters to go in, not providing transparent looks at your operation. | ||
| You know who else does things like that? | ||
| North Korea, Russia, China. | ||
| Are those the people that we want to say that we're like? | ||
| No. | ||
| America is founded on transparency. | ||
| Our country was founded on calling out other people's bullcrap, calling out other people's, you know, like, hey, that don't look right. | ||
| Tea tax, nah, not paying that. | ||
| Not going to put up with that. | ||
| America is founded on that, and yet we're just sitting by and letting this happen. | ||
| And going back, you know, so I have not met. | ||
| Let me just ask: do you know who is funding the Ghazi Humanitarian Foundation? | ||
| Is it an arm of the State Department? | ||
| It's independent NGO. | ||
| Do you know where the money comes from? | ||
| I don't, who is funding it from its base and like who has funded it from the beginning and who put the, you know, the seed money into getting it off the ground. | ||
| I have no idea, but I do know that many, many, many, many people in the United States government and within the media outlets have been working for quite a long time to try to figure that out. | ||
| One indicator for me, you know, it's like when you're looking at a problem, I call it like Occam's razor. | ||
| When you can't figure out what you're trying to find, but you can see the things that are there, it starts to tell you a picture of what the thing is that you can't see. | ||
| It's like the science of a black hole, right? | ||
| Like you can't see it, but you can see everything that's happening around it to tell you what's happening. | ||
| So I would say in this, okay, we have the Gaza Humanitarian Fund led by a Christian Zionist who has no experience in humanitarian assistance and humanitarian aid. | ||
| The Switzerland, Switzerland would not take GHF's accounts. | ||
| Switzerland. | ||
| Switzerland would even open an account for Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they won't open one for GHF. | ||
| That's telling. | ||
| Like, that's like, whoa, that don't pass the sniff test. | ||
| Furthermore, the number one guy in charge of GHF, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Jake Wood, who was a former employee in the beginning of the early paramilitary contractor Blackwater days. | ||
| I don't know if he was necessarily attached directly to Blackwater, but I know he was in that contractor realm. | ||
| Jake Wood, the very first day we began distribution on 26 May, cutting of the ribbon, the golden shovel, the shotgun start for the marathon. | ||
| You know what Jake Wood did? | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| Not going to be a part of it. | ||
| The guy in charge of the entire Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on the day we started distribution for this mothership project quit. | ||
| And he quit and he stepped down citing reasons of unethical practices, not being prepared to execute this mission properly. | ||
| And that's exactly what it is. | ||
| So, and then a couple of weeks later, Boston Consulting Group, they stepped down because they found out that there was things going on that were, that weren't initially conveyed to them in the contract. | ||
| So they left. | ||
| So when everyone starts jumping ship, you kind of start to look around like, where's the hole? | ||
| Like right now, I feel like the United States that we're just rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. | ||
| It's snapped. | ||
| It's going down. | ||
| And instead of like trying to figure out how to get to a lifeboat or trying to figure out how to call for help, we're just rearranging the deck chairs, listening to the band as the ship goes down because we believe what people like Johnny Moore say. | ||
| And it's easily, I wouldn't say it's discreditable. | ||
| I'm not out to discredit anyone. | ||
| I'm just here to present facts, facts that GHF themselves have proclaimed. | ||
| So yesterday, when Chapin Faye finished the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation press conference, of which they took no questions, when he finished, he said, we're going to get back to work delivering 96 million meals to date. | ||
| We should not be celebrating that. | ||
| That is not a mark to congratulate. | ||
| And here's why. | ||
| We've been delivering aid from he when he announced that yesterday, we've been delivering aid for 65 days. | ||
| 65 days. | ||
| Now, you don't have to be Copernicus to figure this out. | ||
| 96 million divided by 2.21 million divided by three meals a day divided by 65 days. | ||
| We have provided food for 15 days out of 65 into the enclave. | ||
| What happened to the other 50 days? | ||
| So to say that people aren't starving and people aren't hungry, I beg to differ. | ||
| What that breaks out to, imagine you're home. | ||
| I mean, I assume you prefer to eat a meal at least once a day, maybe two or three, like the standard breakfast, lunch, and dinner. | ||
| Most Americans think that is the standard. | ||
| You know, if you're only eating one meal a day, okay. | ||
| What if I told you that I'm only eating one meal on Thursday and one meal on Monday? | ||
| That's all I'm eating. | ||
| Would you be like, oh man, that's great. | ||
| You're in a good place. | ||
| No, you would say like, that's stupid. | ||
| Why are you, you're starving yourself? | ||
| You know, it's if my son went to school and the teachers started to notice that he was losing weight and he was emaciated and they came to my house and they said, Mr. Aguilar, is your son eating? | ||
| Yeah, feed him every third day, bowl of cereal every three days. | ||
| I'll feed him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| They're going to be like, you should not be a parent and we're taking your child away from you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation should not be doing humanitarian aid and the United States government should say no and take away the child, which is Palestine, Gaza, and take all that money and support the United Nations process. | ||
| We've been a part of the United Nations for 80 years this year. | ||
| 80 years, 1945, since the United States is one of the signatories to the creation of the United Nations. | ||
| And we're giving him the finger. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that is killing people? | ||
| That's the math. | ||
| Those numbers that I just gave you, that's using their number. | ||
| So if GHF is going to start politicizing math, then I think we're in a bad place. | ||
| How are you treated and how were the other American contractors treated by the IDF and the Israeli government? | ||
| That would be a mixed bag, depending on what level you were at. | ||
| I clearly remember on the, it was the 24th of May, a select few of us, a select few of the leaders were taken to the sites, to the secure distribution sites to kind of get eyes on and kind of get a feel for the for what the sites looked like, kind of get an assessment. | ||
| And I went to one of the towers. | ||
| This was site one. | ||
| Site one is really close to the Mediterranean, right in the corner of Egypt and Gaza and the Med. | ||
| And I went up to the western tower and I'm just kind of looking out, you know, assessing the area. | ||
| And sitting next to the tower, kind of at the base of it, outside of the barrier, of the berm, was a group of Israeli soldiers. | ||
| And they looked up to me and they say, oh, are you an American? | ||
| I was like, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're like, oh, are you here for the aid? | ||
| I was like, yeah. | ||
| And they asked me, why are you feeding our enemy? | ||
| why is America coming here to feed our enemy? | ||
| You're not helping. | ||
| And I was like, Oh, like this. | ||
| I don't have an answer for you. | ||
| Can I get back to you later? | ||
| Like, I don't have an that's how they see it. | ||
| So the guys on the ground, the grunts on the ground, the fighters, the IDF guys on the ground, their perception is that the humanitarian aid going into Gaza is feeding the enemy. | ||
| What about the next level? | ||
| What about the women and children? | ||
| I mean, I understand they don't want you helping Hamas, the leadership of Hamas. | ||
| That makes sense, but these are civilians you're feeding, right? | ||
| Women and children? | ||
| And elderly people and women, children, the disabled, the elderly, the needy. | ||
| Yeah, that's who we're feeding. | ||
| Or that's what I should say. | ||
| That's who we're not feeding. | ||
| That's who we're supposed to be feeding. | ||
| So how are those people the enemy in any war? | ||
| Those are just the bystanders. | ||
| Those are the people who didn't choose the war, who aren't fighting in the war, who are just being hurt by the war. | ||
| And that comment from this infantry IDF infantry soldier on the ground, that's a perception. | ||
| And I think we've also heard the perception from the highest levels of the Israeli government that all of Gaza all is, it's all Hamas. | ||
| Everybody's Hamas. | ||
| And the reason that's striking to me because I feel like someone handed Bibi Netanyahu a list of the violations of the Tajiva Convention, but like took the numbers off of it and he's just checking them off, like displacing the population. | ||
| Well, do that. | ||
| It's like, okay, well, that's a war crime. | ||
| Firing at the civilians to control the population. | ||
| Okay, well, targeting civilians with lethal ammunition to control the population verbatim is a war crime. | ||
| So you got that one. | ||
| Check. | ||
| What next? | ||
| What do you got next? | ||
| We're going to build the humanitarian distribution sites in the middle of combat zones? | ||
| Well, shit, there's Protocol 3. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| You just did that one. | ||
| What's next? | ||
| Oh, how about we label the entire society as Hamas and kill them all? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| You just got a straight across because now you just made another war crime statement because the Geneva Convention specifically inhibits the classification of an entire population as the enemy based on the actions of a few. | ||
| Is Hamas all of Gaza? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No. | ||
| Of course it's not. | ||
| Are we treating them like they're all Hamas? | ||
| Yes, we are. | ||
| Another war crime. | ||
| So when I bring up these points about war crimes, it's not this politicized, bombastic, you know, like, oh, you stepped on my foot. | ||
| That's a war crime. | ||
| Like the war crimes are verbatim. | ||
| The things that they say, not us, they say it. | ||
| We're displacing the population to move them to do combat operations. | ||
| That's a war crime. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what to tell you. | ||
| Well, you're a professional army officer of 25 years, West Point graduate. | ||
| So, I mean, this is your business in a sense. | ||
| So, like, there are rules. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so I think you have credibility. | ||
| You're not, you know, some hippie saying it's a war crime. | ||
| It's like literally a war crime because there is an actual definition. | ||
| And it sounds like they've met. | ||
| There is an actual definition. | ||
| There's a definition of it. | ||
| And when people call certain things war crimes that look horrific, I'm like, well, that's not. | ||
| But I understand that that is horrific, but that's not. | ||
| But there are things that by definition violate the protocols of the Geneva Convention, violate the arms of law, the laws of armed conflict. | ||
| They're black and white. | ||
| It's like reading a driver's ed manual, like stop at a red light. | ||
| That's the law. | ||
| It's not something you can do sometimes unless you want to get a ticket. | ||
| So it's one of those things to where it's like, there's a book that tells us these things. | ||
| The answers to the tests are in this book. | ||
| Someone should read it. | ||
| Well, they also violate the conscience of any person watching. | ||
| And that's enough for us. | ||
| So, okay, so I've asked around the story. | ||
| I just wanted this. | ||
| You've provided a very, very helpful context. | ||
| And again, thank you for your time in doing this. | ||
| So now to the question, how did the Israeli military, the IDF, treat Palestinian civilians? | ||
| I could describe it as nothing more than they treated them like animals. | ||
| Even the UG solutions and the SRS personnel on the ground, what was concerning to me, because I witnessed this in years of Iraq, when you get down the road and you start describing people in a certain way, you start to dehumanize them. | ||
| Even the U.S. contractors on the ground called them the zombie horde. | ||
| The IDF, and in some cases we, don't recognize these people as human beings. | ||
| And part of my, you know, why I want to talk and come out in this is because I saw these human beings. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| This photo here, this is on site one. | ||
| That's a human being. | ||
| I took this photo. | ||
| This didn't come from some far-left journalist or from the Gaza Health Ministry. | ||
| I took that picture. | ||
| You know, these, you know, this year. | ||
| These are the people that we're dehumanizing, that we're killing in mass scale, that we're depriving of food and water, that we are torturing in a way because they're not eating at all. | ||
| And we're calling them all Hamas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what we're calling them. | |
| So I've seen it with my own eyes. | ||
| Not everybody is Hamas. | ||
| And to be fair, I distribute it at every site through distribution windows, morning, afternoon, and evening. | ||
| Most of the contractors there do one site because they're assigned to that site because the nature of my job, I went to all the sites. | ||
| Not once, not once ever. | ||
| And I'm pretty keen at looking out for things and staying alive. | ||
| Not once, ever, did I witness a threat, A hostile act, a weapon, anyone from quote unquote Hamas. | ||
| I mean, how do you do that? | ||
| They don't show up with a t-shirt that says Hamas. | ||
| So, you know, there's, is Hamas amongst the population? | ||
| Well, of course they are. | ||
| But it doesn't mean that the entire population is Hamas. | ||
| So that's the type of discipline and understanding and maturity and wherewithal of an operation like this that's required to do something like this. | ||
| And it's not there. | ||
| It's the Wild West. | ||
| We treat them like animals with no dignity. | ||
| You say that you saw, and again, I just want to state for the fifth time, I've met few people with more experience in situations like this, chaos, foreign country, shooting, soldiers, confusion. | ||
| So, you know, I think you have a lot of experience interpreting what you saw. | ||
| You said you saw no threat at all. | ||
| You didn't see Palestinians with weapons. | ||
| You didn't feel threatened. | ||
| You know, it doesn't, you know, I'm sure there's a threat there, but you didn't experience it. | ||
| But you said that there was shooting. | ||
| Who was shooting at what and why? | ||
| The way, so to walk everyone through kind of how a distribution site works in terms of like, how are people being shot at? | ||
| How does this happen? | ||
| So early in the morning, the Palestinians, because mind you, the Palestinians, to get to the south, they cannot drive. | ||
| They have to walk one way from where they live because they have to go through the established military corridors, just one way to get to where they have to get to. | ||
| They have to walk. | ||
| So they can't just walk straight down to the site. | ||
| They have to go west to the coastal corridor, down the coastal corridor, into the Morag corridor, down to the sites. | ||
| So they're walking anywhere from 8 to 12 kilometers one way, one way to get to the site. | ||
| So when they queue up in the morning at the intersection of the Morog corridor and the coastal road, and the queuing gets to the magnitude of thousands, the IDF hold them there with tanks in place. | ||
| When the UG Solutions personnel call on the radio to the IDF to say the site is ready, the crowd is released in a massive, massive tidal wave of people. | ||
| It's dehumanizing and rushing towards the site because they're starving. | ||
| As they're coming to the site, the IDF shoot at them. | ||
| Machine guns, mortars, tank rounds, artillery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have all of this on video. | |
| Within a matter of minutes, two minutes, 15 seconds, hundreds of Palestinians are already on the site. | ||
| Like, this is not like, it's so compelling when you see it. | ||
| And I'm like, because I watched it. | ||
| And as I'm watching it and feeling and being there, and you hear early morning hours, you know, pre-dawn, sunrise over the Mediterranean, thousands of Palestinians rushing down to the site. | ||
| And over their heads, you just see tracer bullets flying. | ||
| Tracers, tank rounds, artillery rounds. | ||
| And they do that to keep the Palestinians on the right path. | ||
| My suggestion from the very beginning was like, have we tried a sign? | ||
| Put a sign out there? | ||
| Like, I don't know, like put a sign in the road that says go this way instead of shooting a Markava tank round. | ||
| Like, I think that would be like, that would be a great way to kind of start. | ||
| Nope, costs too much. | ||
| We're not going to do it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Telling. | ||
| That's a telling proposition. | ||
| So as they're coming to the site and they're getting shot at, it's dark. | ||
| The Israeli forces in the South are reserve conscripts. | ||
| They're not the IDF that are in the elite active army unit. | ||
| They're conscript reservists. | ||
| They don't train. | ||
| They don't get a lot of training. | ||
| Rarely do they get to shoot their weapons. | ||
| And they don't have night vision capability. | ||
| So they're shooting into the dark at thousands of people to say that when the sun rises and bodies are strewn along the road and the IDF say, oh, we didn't do that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| How did that happen then? | ||
| Like, you did do that. | ||
| Like, you did do that. | ||
| Oh, Hamas did it. | ||
| Hamas is nowhere here. | ||
| This entire area is a militarized controlled zone. | ||
| There's no Hamas here. | ||
| I was like, if Hamas got into here, y'all really aren't doing your job. | ||
| Like, there's no Hamas. | ||
| No one with weapons. | ||
| Dead people strewing along the streets. | ||
| So when you see on the news at Nasser Hospital, when patients get brought in and people then say, oh, that's just Hamas propaganda. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It is not Hamas propaganda. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| The shooting, the indiscriminate shooting. | ||
| When they get onto the site in this mass crowd, just imagine, if you will, if it was Black Friday at Walmart and they cleared out the Walmart, they moved everything out. | ||
| And in the middle of the Walmart, they just put a box of TVs and they were free. | ||
| First in gets them. | ||
| And at nine o'clock, the door crashes open and everybody's squeezing in through the small door into this area. | ||
| And you've got two security guards there. | ||
| On every site, there are 22 armed security guards pulling security. | ||
| So that's one to 409 ratio. | ||
| One guard to 409 people ratio. | ||
| There's no way that the armed security can manage or control that safely. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| So when they get onto the site, I called it the eight minutes of mayhem. | ||
| Within eight minutes, 25,000 boxes of food are stripped through, taken down, and gone. | ||
| Eight minutes. | ||
| It's one of the most chaotic, deprived, dehumanizing things I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| And I was in Baguz, Fagani When ISIS surrendered, talk about dehumanization. | ||
| That is the worst I've seen in my life. | ||
| At the end, when there's a few people left to pick up the remnants of aid, some beans, some rice, the UG Solutions personnel then start clearing the crowd with the procedures that they've adopted from the IDF, where we throw stun grenades, we spray pepper spray. | ||
| I saw in a recent video last week of a UG Solutions person that I know, I know who that person is. | ||
| Like, I know it's real. | ||
| I know he's there. | ||
| I know it's a real person. | ||
| It's not fake. | ||
| And he's standing on a berm. | ||
| And they have these new devices where it's about the size of a fire extinguisher with a fog hose on it to just spray tear gas. | ||
| They have those now. | ||
| And so now that's the standard operating procedure. | ||
| And as they get to the gate and the gates are closed, the IDF guards then shoot at them at their feet over their heads in the air, just like the IDF do. | ||
| And, you know, again, like yesterday when GHF gave their press conference, they even said that. | ||
| Like, Mr. Aguilar has said that shots have been fired at civilians. | ||
| We only shoot at their feet, over their head, and in the air. | ||
| Like, that's exactly what I'm saying you do. | ||
| You're correct. | ||
| But when you're shooting bullets that come out of an automatic rifle at a crowd of thousands of people and you can't see them because there's berms and there's dust and there's intervisibility lines that you can't see and you're just shooting, you're going to kill somebody. | ||
| Period. | ||
| So our guys don't shoot at them. | ||
| They shoot at their feet. | ||
| They shoot over the head. | ||
| They shoot into the air. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, shooting at them, targeting innocent unarmed civilians on the battlefield for the purpose of controlling them or controlling the crowd. | ||
| Again, there you go. | ||
| Another war crime. | ||
| So when we're doing these things, we're just egregiously violating international standards, the standards that we as Americans expect. | ||
| People were hung at Durenberg for things like this. | ||
| Literally things like this like this. | ||
| Shooting at prisoners. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Shooting at prisoners. | ||
| As a case in point, in the United States Army, if I were fighting in Germany and a squad of German soldiers that was just shooting at me puts down their guns and raises their hands, they just became a prisoner. | ||
| I have to feed them. | ||
| I have to give them water. | ||
| I have to take care of them. | ||
| I have to give them safe passage to captivity or to holding. | ||
| Can't just shoot them. | ||
| There are rules in combat. | ||
| There are rules in conflict. | ||
| And we must abide by those. | ||
| Now, what I find to be incredibly, incredibly concerning for the American people and for my fellow teammates, my guys on the ground, American citizens, is that GHS position is, well, we're not, this isn't a war and we're not, we don't have to abide by those rules. | ||
| Well, you do. | ||
| Those rules apply to everybody no matter what. | ||
| But even more so, that you should not have the authority to shoot at anybody. | ||
| We are there as tourists, as I said in the beginning of the show. | ||
| Tourists. | ||
| We should not be pulling the trigger of that gun unless it is absolutely to protect an imminent threat to our life. | ||
| And a case in point, from all of the days and all of the times and all of the sites, I didn't pull the trigger on my rifle one time. | ||
| I didn't pull the pistol on my rifle one time. | ||
| Never even took it out of its holster. | ||
| Stun grenades, tear gas, didn't use it once because I didn't need, I'm not, not because I'm some like, you know, soft, you know, anti-gun, you know, I didn't need it. | ||
| Never one time did I ever need to pull my rifle, shoot my gun, or use means to stun or hurt a civilian ever, not once. | ||
| And I was at more distributions at more sites more time than than any single person in the UG solutions architecture. | ||
| And not once did I ever need to do that, ever. | ||
| And I think I know something about, you know, when it's time to shoot, you know, done a lot. | ||
| So never felt that I had to do that ever, once. | ||
| It's immature. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| It's a violation of our American values. | ||
| That is not how America engages on the world stage. | ||
| We are the ones that do right. | ||
| We are the ones that choose the harder right over the easier wrong. | ||
| We don't do it because the IDFs say it's okay to do it and therefore we can do it. | ||
| Well, we made that bed and we are in it. | ||
| And that bed is about to get flipped over by the international community. | ||
| And if we don't stand up and say something now, like today, tomorrow, if we don't stand up and do something about it, we're going down that road and it's not a good road to be on. | ||
| I hope you can tell your story on Fox News and on every American media outlet as soon as possible. | ||
| I hope they will have you. | ||
| I'm not betting on it, but I hope they will. | ||
| So let me ask you about the story that you have told that's a really difficult story, awful story, but about the boy who you were in contact with who was killed, shot to death. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| So, you know, this little boy is similar in age to my son, brown eyes. | ||
| My son has brown eyes. | ||
| I see my son's face when I look at him. | ||
| And this little boy, you know, he's not ISIS. | ||
| He's not a combatant. | ||
| This was on secure distribution site number two. | ||
| The 28th of May. | ||
| Our second day of doing distribution. | ||
| I'm on that location. | ||
| I didn't get this secondhand. | ||
| I didn't see it from afar and then assume I saw it. | ||
| I touched it. | ||
| I felt it. | ||
| Other people saw it. | ||
| This young little boy, his name is Amir. | ||
| I know that because when he walked over from the crowd of people, he walked toward me. | ||
| There was two of us standing there, two UD Solutions guards standing in that area. | ||
| And he was walking towards us. | ||
| And we thought maybe he was hurt or maybe he was asking for some more food because all he had in his arms was a small bag of rice, half a bag of flour, some lentils that he had picked up from the ground. | ||
| He didn't have much. | ||
| And we thought maybe he was asking for more food or maybe he was hurt. | ||
| And we notioned him over. | ||
| And he came up and he extends his right hand at us. | ||
| And so I kind of walked up to him and waved him over. | ||
| And the guy standing next to me, this young boy, grabs, holds his hand and he kisses it. | ||
| And then he comes to me and he holds my hand and he kisses it. | ||
| In Arab culture, that is a very significant sign of respect. | ||
| That's not something that should be taken lightly or something that should be that's a big sign of respect. | ||
| And we were taken aback by that. | ||
| The gentleman that was standing next to me was also a military veteran, combat veteran. | ||
| So he's been to Afghanistan, Iraq, and he understands. | ||
| He was moved by it. | ||
| He was touched. | ||
| I was touched. | ||
| And as he was standing there, we were both looking at him and he was very emaciated. | ||
| He had no shoes on. | ||
| His pants were tattered. | ||
| He had a kind of a rope or string holding his pants up. | ||
| Filthy. | ||
| Probably hasn't bathed in months. | ||
| Probably hasn't eaten in days. | ||
| And oh, by the way, when they walk eight to 12 kilometers to get to these sites, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation mechanism provides no water. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Not a single bottle. | ||
| Because it's too expensive. | ||
| Distributing water weighs so much that it breaks down the profit per cost per truck. | ||
| That's a fact because I asked why, and I was given a lesson in it. | ||
| This is why. | ||
| It's too expensive. | ||
| So we give them no water. | ||
| All of their food, by the way, requires water to cook it. | ||
| Rice, lentils, beans, flour. | ||
| You got to have water. | ||
| So what we're giving them, I don't know how they're eating it, but he comes, he's standing there and I put my arm on his left shoulder. | ||
| And I look at him and I can feel the bones in his shoulder. | ||
| I can feel the weakness in his arm. | ||
| I can feel the vulnerability. | ||
| I can feel the desperation. | ||
| And I look at him and I look and I got down on my knees where I'm looking at him in the eyes. | ||
| And then I say to him, I said, people care. | ||
| America cares. | ||
| You're not going to be forgotten. | ||
| People in the world care. | ||
| And he doesn't speak English and I don't speak Arabic. | ||
| But the connection we had in looking at each other, he felt like he felt he felt for the first time in a long time that there was someone that cared. | ||
| And I got down on a knee and he came to his level and the items he had in his hand, he sets them down on the ground. | ||
| And his hands, he raises his hands and they're small, fragile. | ||
| You can see bones sticking, you know, just the bones through the skin. | ||
| And he places his hands on my face and he kissed me. | ||
| And he said, he looked at me in the eyes and he says, thank you. | ||
| He said it in English. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Like people are starving in Gaza. | ||
| People are dying in Gaza. | ||
| These children that are starving and dying, these children, you know, they look like everyday Americans. | ||
| This child is picking up noodles off the ground with his bare hands because there was no food left. | ||
| So he's picking up noodles to put into his backpack. | ||
| Amir goes back to the main group and he goes out the exit. | ||
| We had a very strict protocol that they come in a certain way, get the aid, and then they go out a certain way. | ||
| From the way they came in, it takes them back to the way they came in. | ||
| The exit takes them back that same way. | ||
| So they enter from the Marag corridor. | ||
| They go south. | ||
| They go through the station. | ||
| They exit and they go north to the Marag corridor. | ||
| So coming in and going out, they're tied right back into the active combat zone. | ||
| Site number two particularly is a little bit different than the other sites because it's in between site one and two. | ||
| And there's an IDF combat outpost just off the corner of SDS2. | ||
| So there's a berm that lines that road going out. | ||
| So if people are leaving the exit and someone is on the east side of the berm shooting into the crowd over here, you can't see what's on the other side of that berm because of the obscuration, the field of fire. | ||
| So the IDF are shooting at the crowd that's leaving. | ||
| As the crowd left and they would hit the Marag corridor to go west, the IDF would shoot at them, shoot at their feet, shoot over their head. | ||
| We would shoot at them, shoot at their feet, shoot over their head, shoot into the air. | ||
| And the bullets start hitting off the ground. | ||
| There's video of this. | ||
| It's on the BBC video. | ||
| Hitting off the ground, see dirt flying up. | ||
| And I was still on the site. | ||
| I was below the berm. | ||
| It was the second time we had done distribution. | ||
| So when I heard the gunfire kick off, the automatic machine gun fire, I thought we were under attack. | ||
| I thought something had happened. | ||
| So I ran up to the southern berm and I laid down to take cover. | ||
| You know, I'm observing and I'm looking. | ||
| And I see the shooting keep going on, like just the rap and Palestinians dropping on the side of the road. | ||
| So Amir didn't make it home. | ||
| He walked 12 kilometers to get some food, picked up scraps off the ground, because that's all that was left because the eight-minute mayhem took all of the food. | ||
| And by the time he got there, walking with no shoes, hungry and tired, the only thing left for him was to pick up some remnants off the ground. | ||
| And when he left, he was killed by the IDF. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they lack discipline, they lack standards, and they lack basic human decency. | ||
| Now, do I think that they intentionally shot him or shot the people they were shooting at? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| But when you use machine guns and tank rounds and mortar rounds to control a crowd, what do you think is going to happen? | ||
| And the United States stands by and watches it. | ||
| In the press conference that GHF gave last night, will the IDF shoot to control the crowd? | ||
| We only shoot at the crowd in the air around them or at their feet. | ||
| We don't shoot into them. | ||
| Unacceptable behavior. | ||
| That is not how professionals behave when dealing with a civilian population. | ||
| You use things like signs. | ||
| What I thought would be another great, great tool would have been a loudspeaker with a microphone with an interpreter because no one there speaks Arabic and they don't speak English. | ||
| So when you're dealing with a crowd of 8,000 to 9,000 people and you're trying to communicate with them, and I was like, How about before we start shooting? | ||
| How about we do two things? | ||
| One, we provide a loudspeaker with a translator, two, we put signage, we put signs out there that say, go this way, go that way, turn left. | ||
| They don't know where they're going. | ||
| They don't live here. | ||
| It's a war zone. | ||
| So the only way I could describe the sites is death traps. | ||
| And they didn't become death traps. | ||
| They were designed as death traps. | ||
| And the United States puts aid and we lure them in. | ||
| And when they leave, they get shot at coming and they get shot at going. | ||
| So the reports you hear from Nasser Hospital, which is about five kilometers from site number two, Nasser Hospital, that you hear all the reports of dead civilians coming in to get treated. | ||
| The doctors have said this is grotesque. | ||
| Doctors have testified that every time GHF does a distribution at site one, two, or three, which the road from those goes directly to the Nasser Hospital, they get a massive influx of patients to what they call mass casualties, an MCI, mass casualty incident every time. | ||
| Have you ever heard of any other country do it? | ||
| I've never heard of anything like this, but I haven't spent 25 years deployed in war zones. | ||
| I just wanted to see this anywhere. | ||
| Anywhere to this scale. | ||
| Now, in other countries that I've been in with partnered forces, are there sometimes an errant or undisciplined, you know, bad apple in the group that you discipline and you correct that behavior? | ||
| I've seen that at this scale to where it's widely accepted, but then to also the fact that the UG solutions contractors also do it under the guise of, well, the IDF do it, so we're fine with doing it. | ||
| Never, never have I seen an American behave this way. | ||
| Never have I seen an army. | ||
| And I, you know, I've seen some pretty ragtag armies in my day. | ||
| And never have I seen this level of depravity and just disrespect for human dignity. | ||
| And it's, I mean, the word I keep using, because it's the only way I can describe it is because America is giving tax dollars to it. | ||
| It's un-American. | ||
| Now, there has, you came out and told this story, I think, two days ago or a couple of days ago for the first time in public that I'm aware of. | ||
| And there was immediate pushback, as there always is, and your integrity was called into question. | ||
| You're a liar, you're a propagandist, and this boy is not dead. | ||
| This boy is not dead, is what they said. | ||
| Can you address that? | ||
| I directly communicated to the lawyer in the GHF press conference that I demanded that he retract that, and I gave him the facts. | ||
| And this is why. | ||
| The picture that they used, that GHF used and has circulated, the picture they have of a small boy with a contractor with his hands on his head, juxtaposed to the picture of me that I took with this boy standing next to me. | ||
| What's ironic is that the picture they have of the man, of the contractor standing there with his hand on the boy's head, I took that picture too. | ||
| It's like they're giving me back my own material as proof to the material. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| So the picture that I have, this picture with me, myself, and Amir and everybody on site, that is distribution site number two on the 29th of May. | ||
| That picture's been geolocated, metadata checked. | ||
| It's legit. | ||
| The picture that they provided to say, oh, look, here's a picture of this contractor two days later with Amir. | ||
| Disgusting. | ||
| Disgusting. | ||
| That picture that I took, the guy with his hand on the kid's head, is from site number four on the 1st of June. | ||
| There is no way physically possible that the child could have gotten from site two. | ||
| Sites one, two, and three are all the way in the south, south of the Marag corridor. | ||
| Site number four is all the way in the central at the Nesareen corridor. | ||
| Nobody can cross between those two areas. | ||
| So unless he flew there or beamed him up and he transported there, that wouldn't be him. | ||
| But number two, you put the pictures right next to each other, not kind of like here and here, but right next to each other. | ||
| It's obvious they're not the same person. | ||
| They don't have the same hair. | ||
| They don't have the same teeth. | ||
| Their ears are a different size. | ||
| I ran it through an AI generator and it said, that's not the same person because it's not the same person. | ||
|
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So why would Amir was killed on the 29th of May? | |
| Why would this humanitarian foundation whose funding we know nothing about, you worked for them and you still know nothing about them. | ||
| I'm sure they're taking U.S. tax dollars. | ||
| Run by this. | ||
| They're taking U.S. tax dollars. | ||
| Run by this Christian Zionist kind of preacher, maybe? | ||
| It's not exactly clear who he is. | ||
| I looked him up online. | ||
| He's got all kinds of business ventures that don't, you know, I'm not going to pass judgment, but he also says he's a preacher. | ||
| Johnny Moore, this Christian leader, why would a Christian leader try to hide the fact that a child was murdered? | ||
| So here's my take on it is that, and the other thing is that there's humanitarian organizations in Gaza that are currently from that photo looking for the next of kin. | ||
| And that will come out soon when they confirm that he is dead. | ||
| That has also been put out to the Nasser hospital to confirm that that boy was brought in on the when he was, if he was brought in. | ||
| So the truth will come out. | ||
| The truth always wins. | ||
| I've known that in my entire life. | ||
| The truth always wins. | ||
| And I know it's the truth because from the picture they provided on site four and the picture they provided on site two, I took those pictures. | ||
| I was standing there. | ||
| Like I took those pictures. | ||
| So for the concept to say that, oh, look, here's Amir a couple days later at the same site. | ||
| First of all, they said, here's Amir a couple days later at the same site. | ||
| Well, that's not true because the picture that they have from a couple days later is from site number four. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| I took the picture. | ||
| They're not the same child. | ||
| Why the cover up or why the line? | ||
| So when they say that I have an agenda, political, whatever it may be. | ||
| There's absolutely no evidence of that. | ||
| I've never run for office. | ||
| I don't own a business. | ||
| I don't write books. | ||
| I don't have some kind of platform. | ||
| I don't have a podcast. | ||
| I don't even have social media. | ||
| I mean, they shut down my MySpace account last month because they took it down from, you know, from the web. | ||
| So I don't even have MySpace anymore. | ||
| So I have nothing like that. | ||
| I have no skin in the game of this, but to tell the truth, what they have in the game is a lot of money to the tune of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| So do they care about a Palestinian life or that the people know about that life over making hundreds of millions of dollars? | ||
| Well, the American people can judge that. | ||
| Who do you want to believe? | ||
| A 25-year veteran who went to West Point where our motto is duty, honor, country. | ||
| A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those that do. | ||
| And I lived that motto and graduated from West Point and lived that motto in my army career. | ||
| And I have nothing to gain from any of this whatsoever at all. | ||
| That I was there and I took the pictures and I witnessed it with my own eyes and it brings me to tears. | ||
| I'm a 43-year-old man, 25 years in the Army as a Green Beret. | ||
| You think I went to acting school for this? | ||
| It breaks my heart. | ||
| So who are you going to believe? | ||
| The evangelical Zionist who has billions of dollars to gain by this, by everything being just fine? | ||
| Or the 25-year veteran Green Beret who went to West Point, who's earned a purple heart for this country, who's bled on the battlefield for this country, who's earned valor awards for combat, valor? | ||
| Who are you going to believe? | ||
| The guy that sits in Washington, D.C., that's been to Gaza once? | ||
| Or his lawyer who's never been to Gaza at all? | ||
| Or are you going to believe the guy that was there, that took the pictures, that touched the boy, that saw it with my own eyes? | ||
| So who are you going to believe? | ||
| That's what I offer. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Well, I think most people watching will make up their minds on that pretty quickly. | ||
| We are going to attempt to interview Johnny Moore. | ||
| And I hope he agrees to that interview. | ||
| So my last question is, I just want to thank you a third time for taking the time for this conversation. | ||
| I'm thankful for you. | ||
| I'm thankful for your time and your platform. | ||
| This is an important story. | ||
| And this is not my story. | ||
| I'm simply the vessel to translate the story of the people in Palestine, human beings. | ||
| Let's just call them human beings. | ||
| Human beings that are being treated with inhumanity. | ||
| So I thank you for your time. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| What should the Trump administration, what should the United States government do in response? | ||
| I hope that every decision maker, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure this happens, sees your testimony, sees this video, listens to what you just said, and you just experienced firsthand. | ||
| But how should they respond to it? | ||
| But also like the analysis that I had sent to your producers on the, you know, I created a product for them last night with the comparison of the boy they said was him and him and put them together with the, you know, the map data and everything. | ||
| So sharing that would also be helpful because I think it's shameful, shameful to make a, to make a political position out of something like that. | ||
| But it's also in a way kind of telling to where, you know, according to Johnny Moore, every Palestinian looks alike. | ||
| Not a good look, Johnny. | ||
| No. | ||
| So not not what our religion, not what our religion says, that God knows every hair on your head and that each soul is distinct and created by God. | ||
| I mean, that's a foundational Christian understanding of humanity. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| For a self-described Christian preacher to say something like that is shocking to me. | ||
| So your question on what should be done, great question, because that's the, you know, the second part of my effort here is to take action. | ||
| I don't just throw up problems. | ||
| I want to provide solutions. | ||
| And there's been thorough analysis done on this. | ||
| I've done the analysis and I've got no, I've already given it to UG Solutions. | ||
| I was like, here's the analysis I've done. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation should cease to exist. | ||
| And here's why. | ||
| The existence of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its creation and existence creates a misnomer, a lie, that this mechanism is working and that the UN is not needed. | ||
| That's a lie. | ||
| Regardless of what we call the method, whether it's GHF, whether it's the UN, whether it's Greta Thunberg handing out PBJ sandwiches on the Mediterranean beach, whatever the method is, it has to be able to feed 2.21 million people a day, three meals a day, every day, and bring in water, fuel. | ||
| Remember, the GHF aid brings no water, no pampers, no diapers, no fuel, no medicine, no hygiene products, just dried food. | ||
| Nothing else. | ||
| Nothing else. | ||
| So the method, whatever it is, needs to be a method that can handle the capacity of 500 to 550 trucks a day, every day, that can manage 400 to 500 sites throughout the entirety of Gaza. | ||
| I mean, imagine if in the state of Florida they said, hey, you want food? | ||
| You got to come down to Key West. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| Like, it's absurd. | ||
| So, you know, the method that needs to be in place has to be able to service 400 to 500 sites in Gaza, needs to be able to service 500 to 550 trucks a day. | ||
| That's the math. | ||
| That's the math that's been done. | ||
| And they need to do it every day. | ||
| And they need to have experts in humanitarian assistance, doctors to understand medical assessments, veterinarians to look at the animals to make sure that we're not spreading rabies. | ||
| All these things you don't think about that because I've done it so much, when you go to places like that, you're like, oh yeah, if we don't assess the animal population, everybody could die of rabies. | ||
| We don't want that. | ||
| All these things that go into that. | ||
| Well, the UN provides that. | ||
| That was the UN model. | ||
| The UN model was taking in 550 to 600 trucks a day, going to 400 sites with doctors, veterans, nurses, teachers, water, fuel, enough food. | ||
| That was the mechanism. | ||
| So when it first Came out that, oh, well, the UN method just gives it all to Hamas. | ||
| Well, Israel themselves, the intelligence apparatus within Israel, the American USAID, the American State Department, other nations in the last day or two have all come out to say there is no evidence that the humanitarian aid was going into the hands of Hamas at any rate that that's considerable to make an impact to the feeding. | ||
| Now, was some of it going into the hands of Hamas? | ||
| Well, sure, because Hamas is amongst the population. | ||
| I mean, again, how do you, who's Hamas? | ||
| I mean, I know who they are politically, but like, how do you tell? | ||
| Like, hey, are you Hamas? | ||
| Well, they don't have their Hamas t-shirt on that day. | ||
| I guess you won't know. | ||
| So the mechanism in place now with what's being delivered, well, there's a cut going to Hamas. | ||
| So we're delivering this much aid right now, and there's a cut going to Hamas, where under the UN mechanism, we can deliver this much aid with that much potentially going to Hamas. | ||
| It's no comparison. | ||
| It's no question. | ||
| The United States should cease funding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation now today. | ||
| Demand accountability on where that money went. | ||
| Because I can tell you, seeing there and being there and the resources that we spent, I don't know where that 30 million went. | ||
| It didn't go to Gaza. | ||
| Somebody better check some bank accounts. | ||
| Yes, immediately. | ||
| But it wasn't the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that shot Amir. | ||
| So the question is, why would U.S. government funding? | ||
| Fair point. | ||
| You described the IDF as totally without decency, undisciplined people who committed war crimes on a daily basis. | ||
| Why would the U.S. government be funding that? | ||
| So here's one thing that I will say that I want to make clear on the record. | ||
| I have worked with the IDF on numerous occasions in my military career, not just in this mission. | ||
| I also, I stand with Israel in condemning the violence of Hamas. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When I got into Israel on May 19th, the very next day on the 20th, I had some time in the evening. | ||
| I got a rental car and I went from Beersheba. | ||
| That's where I was staying before we started operations. | ||
| And I drove to Kibbutz Bieri. | ||
| Kibbutz Bieri is the kibbutz outside of Gate 96 that Hamas hit first when they came through Gate 96. | ||
| That's the gate they broke. | ||
| That's the gate they came through. | ||
| And they slaughtered and murdered 300 plus 300 people in the kibbutz. | ||
| Then they went to the Nova Film Festival. | ||
| I went to those sites. | ||
| I went there on purpose because I wanted to feel the gravity of Israel's position. | ||
| I wanted to understand with my own eyes, not what I heard on the news, what I saw, but to feel it. | ||
| And did I feel anger? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did I feel disgust? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did I feel sorrow, sadness, and pain and vengeance? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| But there are rules. | ||
| If we lose our humanity in saying that, well, we're just going to do what Hamas did because they did it so we could do it to them, we've lost. | ||
| Hamas has already won. | ||
| We've lost our way. | ||
| So what I plead to the people of Israel and to the Israeli army, let's not lose our way. | ||
| America and Israel, let's not lose our way. | ||
| Let's stay the course of what's tried and true and what we've known throughout life, and that's dignity and respect for humans. | ||
| We all demand that. | ||
| So the relationship with the IDF, I don't characterize all of the IDF that way. | ||
| The forces that are deployed in the South, the IDF reserve conscripts, need to be better trained and better equipped and have better leadership to be in the situation that they're in now. | ||
| Imagine, if you will, if the United States went to war and all of the U.S. Army Rangers and all of the U.S. Army Green Berets and all of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne was gone and deployed and we needed more people. | ||
| So we call up the Boy Scout PAC 902 and say, get your guns, boys. | ||
| We who called them up would be doing them a disservice. | ||
| Israel has done the IDF a disservice and they're in a position where they're in way over their heads. | ||
| So the behavior that I saw is classic. | ||
| I've seen this throughout my entire career. | ||
| It's a matter of discipline. | ||
| It's a matter of leadership. | ||
| And the same thing I say that I've said before, my issues with the GHF down, it's not the men on the ground that are trying to do their best in the situation they're in. | ||
| Now, have some made some bad decisions and have done things that are just completely off the field? | ||
| Yes, they have. | ||
| There's always a bad actor. | ||
| But it's the leadership. | ||
| The leadership has failed to provide guidance and resources and education and training. | ||
| Same with the IDF in Gaza. | ||
| Their leadership has failed them because they've put them into a situation that is untenable and that you cannot avoid. | ||
| You can't avoid the civilian deaths because 8,000 to 9,000 people rushing through your What are you supposed to do? | ||
| There's not much you can do. | ||
| And the leadership haven't provided them with any guidance on how to control that situation, just like they didn't provide any guidance to the UG solutions personnel on how to control that situation. | ||
| This is a leadership problem that touches all the way down to the tactical level. | ||
| Now, the IDF should be held accountable for that, regardless of why it happened, when you shoot at civilians with tanks, mortars, rifles, machine guns, when you purposely displace the population, when you purposely use razor wire, again, razor wire banned by the Geneva Convention for the use of civilian purposes for hospitals, water points, and distribution sites. | ||
| And that's what we're using, razor wire. | ||
| And UG Solutions asked for that. | ||
| When they did, I was like, whoa, ho, step back, cowboy. | ||
| That's not a good idea. | ||
| That violates Geneva Convention. | ||
| We can't use razor wire. | ||
| Well, there's no difference. | ||
| And I was like, there is. | ||
| There's a difference between barbed wire, concertina wire, and razor wire. | ||
| And razor wire specifically condemned the Geneva Convention to use at civilian sites. | ||
| Don't use it. | ||
| Ah, IDF gave it to us. | ||
| They said it was fine. | ||
| Okay, so let's just rack up another war crime. | ||
| So the IDF should be held accountable. | ||
| These things should be investigated. | ||
| The IDF, I think they've already kind of alluded to this. | ||
| I don't know if it's happening or not. | ||
| They seriously need to go through their army and have a seriously restructuring of discipline and standards and leadership. | ||
| I'm not prepared to say that the entire IDF is that way, but from what I saw from an entire division, the 403rd Division Israeli Reserve in the South, they need a serious sit-down talk amongst themselves to fix themselves because it's going off the rails. | ||
| Colonel, I'm grateful. | ||
| God bless you for doing this. | ||
| You don't benefit from it. | ||
| You will be attacked. | ||
| I think anyone who watches what you just said can make up his own mind about your credibility and your integrity. | ||
| But from my perspective, you are absolutely the best that we send. | ||
| And so, again, God bless you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. |
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