Retired Green Beret Anthony Aguilar exposes Israel’s Gaza operations as a "starvation war crime," detailing how the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—backed by $30M in U.S. funds—placed aid sites in IDF-controlled combat zones, where M855 armor-piercing rounds were fired as "warning shots" at civilians, killing 20 in a July stampede. A former contractor for UG Solutions, he describes GHF’s profit-driven model, IDF-imposed restrictions (like denying water to cut costs), and contractors armed with automatic rifles despite tourist visas. Aguilar, who resigned after witnessing these abuses, dismisses GHF CEO Johnny Moore’s pro-Hamas smear campaign, warning that unchecked violence will spark a brutal insurgency while demanding U.S. accountability for enabling Israel’s tactics. [Automatically generated summary]
I wanted to speak to you at greater length, given that after our interview last week, a barrage of attacks against you, some of them sounded kind of serious, came out.
And I wanted to give you an opportunity to respond, but also to clarify some of the points that your former employer is making about you, Johnny Moore, who runs your organization.
The Gaza Humanitarian Federation was on television this weekend calling you a liar or suggesting that anyone who criticizes his group is pro-Hamas, et cetera, et cetera.
So I'm just going to go through some of the claims against you because you're making some significant statements that will, I think, color people's understanding of what's happening in Gaza.
So I think it's important to do this.
So first, I just want to get to your separation from the Army was in January.
You left the Army in March, if I'm remembering correctly.
What did you do right after you left the U.S. Army after 25 years?
I don't even have LinkedIn for employment purposes.
My family and I enjoy a private life because we enjoy our lives together.
I'm not really seeking anyone's approval.
I'm not seeking clicks or follows or Instagram likes.
So yeah, when I first got out of the Army, I was keeping things pretty low-key.
I'm spending a lot of time with the family.
My wife and I are both, my wife and I are co-den leaders together in my son's Cub Scout den.
So we co-den lead for my son's Boy Scout den, which is phenomenal.
We love it.
And just all the things we're involved in.
And after my years in service and the places I've been and the family moments that I've missed in life, I felt that the rest of my life should be committed to being a good father, raising a good family, because I think that's what that's the next phase in life for me is contributing to the next generation.
So you get out after graduating West Point, 25 years in the U.S. Army, Green Beret, Lieutenant Colonel, is your rank when you get out, if I'm remembering that.
They called me and they were asking, you know, we're specifically looking for recently retired or out of service soft veterans to join us on this mission to Gaza to do the distribution of humanitarian aid.
I thought that perhaps this company was humanitarian aid focused.
I could find very little on the company, but I did see that they were based in North Carolina.
I saw that the founder of the company, his claim to fame was that he was a Green Beret at one point.
He served as a Green Beret in the United States Army.
And once he got out, he went into some entrepreneurship with a post-recovery alcohol hangover drink.
I don't know what it was called.
But it kind of gave me pause to think that where's the expertise?
Where's the experience?
Where's the and I thought, okay, maybe, you know, maybe he's just an energy drink company?
Energy drink slash.
It was advertised as the ultimate hangover beverage for the, for the soft operator that, you know, has a few many drinks the night before can get ready for the mission the next day.
That was kind of his claim to fame is that he even in his biography on the website for this company, he calls himself self-titled.
I'm not calling him this.
This is not me saying it.
He calls himself a derelict.
So it just kind of gave me pause that this is, and I thought, okay, maybe he's just the, you know, the owner.
You know, sometimes the owners don't necessarily contribute to the mission, but it did give me pause to think, you know, how, how did all of this come together?
How did all this, how did all this come together so quickly in the hiring?
And, you know, so they called me.
And the question that I've had many a time that I often ask myself is, why did you do it then?
And I remember I sat when they called me, I said, my answer is not yes.
My answer is not no.
I'd like to discuss it with my wife and, you know, just consider the timing.
And let me, let me get back with you.
And when I talked to my wife, I told her, I said, hey, going into this, full eyes wide open, this is going to be rough.
It's probably going to be dangerous because the amount of just the what I see as like the lack of experience in planning to this magnitude, this is a seriously complex and seriously complicated mission that requires, you know, people that have deep experience in this.
This is, again, as I've said, this is not a weekend job.
This is not a, you know, let's just go try this out.
This requires depth of expertise, which was not present.
So I talked to my wife about it.
My wife said, well, you know, you do, you have done a lot of that.
So you can contribute.
You can, you can help.
You can be of value.
What I really believed in was that if the United States was going to go into Gaza proclaiming that our method is going to replace the UN, we're going to do this now.
That I wanted to be a part of what I thought at the time was truly an American ideal, an America, an idea of American exceptionalism, that America will go in into the breach, into danger, and will help.
That's what I really felt.
Like I really felt like that America was putting a good foot forward in this to say, like, hey, we, we respect our ally.
We don't want to necessarily get involved or criticize the prosecution of the war, but we also realize and recognize a real need to end the starvation.
So I really felt that being a part of it was something that was in line with American values.
Not only was I was I not fired, and I've brought some points to discuss to kind of lay out the pathway to my eventual termination in terms of me, you know, they call contract termination that I terminated my contract in writing.
So in terms of contract termination, yes, my contract was terminated.
I terminated it in writing.
So quit.
Essentially, yes, you could say that.
I quit in protest, much like those before me, much like Jake Wood, former director of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, who stepped down in protest.
The second in charge of the entire contract for UG Solutions, who on the 27th of May with a very scathing email to the leadership, to the CEO, stepped down in protest.
The one of the operations directors in the higher level company of Safe Reach Solutions stepped down in protest.
I was not the first and I was not the last.
When I did, I quit in a way to where I wanted to stay involved in the mission.
So I had coordinated to work with Safe Reach Solutions, again, the prime contract, to specifically be working on the humanitarian assistance team, because that would put me in a position to where I could then influence how operations on the sites ran.
I would, as the humanitarian assistance team person that had leadership to take charge and to plan accordingly, I could be in charge of how rules of engagement, standard operating procedures, distribution process, organization and planning.
And I felt that it was better for me to stay and be involved than to walk away and just leave, you know, leave no one at the wheel.
So I did terminate my contract in writing on the 13th of June and provided it to the leadership in writing.
Not only do I have the email, you know, I have the email chain.
I have the, you know, the actual letter itself that I, that I wrote to them.
And, you know, you can, you can read it yourself, but this was provided in writing.
And what I would continue to ask of UG Solutions and Gaza Humanitarian Foundation with Johnny Moore, who, you know, if he wants to say that I am a liar, I think that that's said that I'm a liar.
And that's, that's unfortunate because he doesn't know me.
I have opinions about him, but I don't know him either.
But to say that I'm a liar, I served our country for 25 years in uniform.
And what I would say is that America made me.
Graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
I served in the army for 25 years, answered the call not just once, twice, three, four times, but 12 to fight in battle for the ideals of this nation.
So for him to call me a liar, I think that all veterans and all Americans should take pause and think about who's calling me a liar.
Someone that has spent his entire life self-serving with PR firms and selling Bibles and whatever else it is he does on the side.
He's only, I mean, I think he's only, so what's interesting is that this entire time that this operation's been going on now for, you know, operating since the 26th of May till now, so breaking 70 days, he's only been there one time for a photo op.
And what's important to understand is that going with a missionary organization to somewhere and distributing some meals or providing religious support, that isn't humanitarian assistance.
It's water, medical, veterinarian services to make sure that we're not, we don't have a rabid animal population.
It's so many things that the experts within the United Nations that are educated, that spend their lives to become experts in, are very, very, very good at doing.
So to think that we can just take that on and do it is a very arrogant way of looking at this problem.
I just saw him interviewed on Fox News, and he suggested you and everyone else who's criticized the operations of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are pro-Hamas.
Well, I would say on his appearance on Fox, you know, in just the short time I've been doing this with no PR firm and no, no polished background, I was a soldier.
And after I was a soldier, I worked a blue-collar job.
And I call myself a husband and a father.
I don't call myself by any other name.
And since this story has broke, from Hollywood to Bollywood, polar bears to penguins, people want this story because it's the truth, not because of me, because the world wants to hear the truth for once.
And during that press conference, which I watched, they didn't respond to a single, not one of the allegations you made about their conduct in Gaza.
Not one.
Instead, it was a litany of attacks on you.
So I just want to continue to go through some of them to get your response.
So the most damaging from my perspective by far was the fact, and they showed the signal messages, that you had written complimentary texts to the management of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation at the time you now say you were dissatisfied with their conduct.
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You're saying that the texts that they waved around at the press conference and the Johnny Moore.
And, you know, that's that's both disappointing and surprising because every photo that they put in that PowerPoint to show different things are pictures that I took on location.
I was on a distribution site in Gaza every day.
24th of May, mid-SDS1.
And I brought these so you can, so you can, so you can look at them there.
I was not only there, I was there when others were not.
Case in point, we had, and you may found this story amusing, we had 30 Palestinian volunteers, local workers, so Palestinians that worked with us on the sites.
In a lot of the photos, they're the ones that you see with the blue vests.
And they were there to work with us to help with communication, to help, you know, they're from the local population to help to help with the crowd as much as they could.
And they were brought onto the location, but GHF and SRS hadn't budgeted the money to feed them.
So for a foundation that's supposed to be feeding people, thus far they've proven that they can't even feed their own employees.
So myself and one of the humanitarian team workers who works for SRS, there was nothing else we could do because it was Shabbat and everything was closed in Israel.
And then with an armored vehicle with armored personnel, myself and two others armed, we delivered Domino's pizza to security distribution site one so that the local pop the local Gazan workers or the local Palestinian workers could eat that night because GHF and SRS had no plan in place to feed our local Palestinian workforce.
We delivered them pizza.
I would also like to add that we did it in less than 30 minutes.
So it sounds, so I think you've, to my satisfaction, you've batted down the three main claims they made against you, but those are not the only claims.
I don't know if Gaza Humanitarian Affairs or Johnny Moore is saying this directly, but your family's been attacked extensively since you told your story.
Where's that coming from and what's your reaction to it?
Not only was I honorably discharged, I was honorably discharged under what's called a 100% combat-related special compensation, which is rare.
So in the military, when you retire, there's the VA process, separate process.
Everybody can apply to that.
Through the military, through DOD, there's the combat-related special compensation process to where if what you've endured is directly as a result of combat, you can have a further special compensation to where not only am I a 100% totally and permanently disabled U.S. Army veteran, honorably discharged with honors.
The Army has also credentialed me with 100% combat-related special compensation, meaning that my injuries and wounds afford me to where none of my income is taxed because of the sacrifice I made for this country.
So what I think is, well, so individuals have who who think that they know me, who don't.
Again, all of these people that have attacked my family and I, we think it's, we find it amusing because they all do it from behind a keyboard, from behind some Twitter handle.
No one's come on the record.
Here I am on the record.
My name, my reputation, my life.
You can find me on the internet.
I'm here.
But people that choose to attack me do it behind a pseudonym or behind their keyboard.
If America thinks that anybody should trust that, I don't think most Americans do.
And the attacks I've had is that, oh, well, of course he's never seen anything that brutal before because he, well, he was SF.
He never saw combat.
He didn't command a special forces company.
And what I would like to say to people out there that think otherwise, not only did I command a special forces company in 3rd Special Forces Group, 1st Battalion, I was also the battalion's executive officer and deployed that entire battalion to combat.
I was then offered a second command to command the United States Army Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape School.
So not only did I command a special forces operational combat unit, I also commanded the United States Army's Sear School at Fort Brack.
So for anybody that wants to say that, well, he commanded here and didn't command that, you can FOIA my DD 214 and you can read it.
You get out a long lifetime, 25 years, distinguished career, highest level, and then you work at Lowe's Home and Garden Center and run a Cub Scout troop.
And then you decide you're going to go over and try and pass out food to starving people.
And then you decide what they're doing is immoral and you say so.
I mean, those all seem like the right thing to do.
I don't really know where's your crime exactly.
Is it you criticize the behavior of a company that's serving a foreign government and that makes you a criminal?
So I would portend, although I have no proof because I have no way of knowing this.
I don't even, I don't even know.
I haven't even, I haven't even seen the posts myself.
And to be quite honest, they're, they're clowns.
My family members have looked at them and they're all under, I think one guy calls himself Green Beret Nap Time.
Oh, yeah, I'm really going to lose sleep over what that guy thinks of me.
So the it part of it is ignorance.
People who haven't been there think they know because of what they heard from their buddies who also haven't been there.
To the men that are there, mark my words, because I have lived it.
When they come home and the adrenaline wears off and the $1,380 a day stops and life goes back to normal and you have to look at your children and you have to look at your wife and you have to look at yourself in the mirror, it's going to come to you.
And when that day comes, you're going to want to tell the truth.
I've seen it.
I was on site with these men where they see things and they're like, what are we doing?
That's not right.
That shouldn't be.
And it's easy to ignore it when you're in Gaza, where seemingly people don't care, where you can report 30 deaths outside of a distribution site and have Johnny Moore say it didn't happen and get away with it.
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Communist-affiliated drug gangs destroying parts of the United States, the parts that Washington ignores, to sell drugs, laundering money and building a black market network inside this country's most beautiful but least served areas.
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The purchase of churches and schools to aid the operation, the jerry-rigging of power boxes to steal electricity, foreign pesticides, collusion with the Mexican cartels.
It's unbelievable.
By the way, one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house.
Johnny Moore has seemed to deflect every instance of, and again, what I find interesting is that the people that are coming out and speaking to the atrocities aren't Hamas, doctors, surgeons, Americans.
If it came from anybody that I held to be credible, maybe I would care.
But I mean, who is Johnny Moore?
I think it's, I think yesterday when he was on Fox, it was, it made my heart warm that you could hear outside of the Fox studio the protesting.
In fact, the host said, we have some people outside exercising their constitutional rights.
And yes, continue the protest.
Go to his house and protest because he is lying to the American people.
And it's really sad.
So if Mr. Johnny Moore wants to call me Hamas or call me a name or say that I don't know what I'm doing or say that I'm a liar, it matters not to me because the American people know better.
I know you made it clear that you didn't work for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, but you worked providing security for them through a couple of different layers.
And what's appalling to me is that that exact same question you asked, sir, is the same question that every member of Congress that I spoke to over the last two weeks has asked me.
The only indication anyone has to include, again, not just lonely old peon me, but Congress.
Our United States Congress has no idea where the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's money comes from, other than the 30 million that came to the State Department last month.
So from in terms of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation at that level, that high level, I can't say.
I would think that there's probably a higher entity.
now safe reach solutions, which is the actual contract mechanism, like the actual, um, the, the execution of the contract, um, does answer to, and the client is the IDF.
And that was told directly to me, looking at me in my face by the, they're the contractor that provides security or everything else as well.
Okay, so Safe Reach Solutions is the contractor that handles like all the details for passing out aid from building the facilities to providing men with guns to protect them.
I mean, the way I would describe it is that the United States is providing a humanitarian assistance mechanism that is not providing food nor water nor assistance.
That what I would call is an appendage of the Israeli Defense Force.
So if you consider the combat operations that have been going on in southern Gaza, in any combat operation, you have an offensive force and you have a sustainment force.
You have a shaping force.
If the active combat, activated combat reserve units in the south are the combat component conducting offensive operations, SRS, thereby Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, I would call shaping operation number one.
Displace the population, move the population, allow for phase two, the ending of Operation Gideon's chariots.
That just ended last night.
That started when we got there, like the day after we got into country.
From what's called the Marag corridor, which runs east to west, just north of the sites, through Rafah, Mawasi, Khan Yunis, Berish, up to the Nesarim corridor.
So, yeah, so that is, that was the objective of Operation Gideon's Chariots, which as of last night came to an end.
Highly criticized because they didn't accomplish that task entirely.
But now they're shifting into the next phase, which from a military perspective, if you are trying to absolutely destroy a nation, that's exactly what you would do.
You conduct wide area security, you conduct offensive operations, you establish control, and then you occupy.
The IDF, again, I'd like to clarify in terms of the position that the IDF is in, the Israeli Defense Forces, the position that they've been put in in the South is untenable, operationally unsound.
And they shouldn't be to have active, and I put that on GHF because when the IDF said, here are these sites, we put them in operational combat zones.
That's why Jake Wood stepped down.
Jake Wood on the 26th of May, day one, cut the ribbon, yellow shovel, or golden shovel.
And in fact, in some of the videos that have been taken that I've taken, and I think it's another interesting story to go down the, you know, how the videos got released because UG Solutions released them themselves, which was ironic.
But in one of those videos, I'm walking and one of the other contractors with me says, it shouldn't be this way.
It didn't have to be this way.
We didn't need to do this.
And what he's talking about is the fact that the Palestinian crowd was calm and controlled and they were leaving.
When you're trying to push thousands of people through a very small exit, it doesn't happen quickly.
So as they're leaving, UG Solutions personnel following the lead of the, it's what the IDF do, spraying with pepper spray, stun grenades, warning shots.
This contractor, he's walking next to me and he says clearly, it's in the conversation of the video, shouldn't be this way.
We shouldn't be doing this.
It didn't have to be this way.
And I said, and I say to him in the video, like, hey, you know, because he was, he was one of the leaders of the mobile team.
He wasn't in charge on site.
So he was just a, he didn't have the authority.
But I was like, hey, you did it.
He did a very good job of maintaining his composure.
And I said, hey, you did a good job.
This isn't on you.
You know, we did, you did what you could.
But people recognize it.
And people are coming forward.
There are a number of, at least close to a dozen now, of other contractors that have either come out off the record and some that will soon that are multiple coming coming on the record.
So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions, they can bash me, bury me, make fun of me, all they want.
It doesn't bother me.
I've got skin in this game, but what they think bothers me not.
Others are coming behind me.
Is GHF going to call everybody a liar?
Are they going to call everybody a disgruntled employee?
All of these American veterans that raised their right hand to serve our country in uniform for decades when Johnny Moore didn't serve his country a day.
I think they probably got even less training than the UG Solutions guys did before they went in, and that's pretty abhorrent.
Not disciplined, not professional soldiers.
It's not what they do.
Not impressed with their proficiency and performance because, granted, as a reserve force that's called up and immediately put into combat, when the United States calls up reserve forces, we put them through an extensive preparation.
And they were thrown into the fire, thrown into the fire by the Israeli government into a precarious, untenable situation that no army should have to deal with.
You should not put food distribution sites in an active combat area.
And I think that on the at the lower level, and it's starting to come out now.
Every day, there are more and more IDF soldiers that are returning home.
Again, as I said, when these contractors come home and the adrenaline's gone and you're not living and you're not in the situation anymore, and you have to look yourself in the mirror and those things come back to you that we shouldn't have done that.
We shouldn't have allowed that.
Same thing that's happening with these IDF soldiers.
They're reservists.
They're in there for 90 days.
They come home.
Almost like clockwork as they come out of that field, as they come out of the field and they decompress.
They have to look at themselves in the mirror.
When you're in there and you're in war and the fog and friction of war alter your compass, alter your azimuth, Yugo, your moral compass.
And when you step back into society where there's expectations of civilization and that moral compass straightens up again, there's a lot to answer for.
It's happening.
A lot of the IDF that are there that are serving are coming out and saying, like, yes, we were ordered to shoot the children.
Again, even the lawyer for UG Solutions who spoke against me said that Aguilar is a liar.
Though our forces may shoot warning shots at their feet and over their heads, we don't shoot at them.
Well, thank you, Mr. Contract Attorney, for admitting to a war crime on the record because shooting at an unarmed population, targeting, shooting at them, shooting in their direction intentionally to control them is specifically prohibited in the protocols of the Geneva Convention.
So thank you, Mr. Attorney, for putting that on the record.
No, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Safe Reach Solutions, UG Solutions, we don't have anything to do with it.
The IDF will come in, collect up the bodies, or the IDF will allow the International Red Cross, Red Crescent to come in and take the bodies, in this case, from site number three to the Al-Nasser hospital.
And what I find interesting in that very instance, that same day, July 16th, 20 people killed on site three.
GHF even put it in a release, sadly, to report that 20 Palestinians or 20 civilians were killed on site.
Hamas did it.
Hamas started the stampede.
But then when the hospitals, when the surgeons in Nasser Hospital said, we received 30 dead bodies from, or excuse me, 20, 20 dead bodies from this site, IDF and GHF said they're lying.
You just, you just said that 20 people were killed on your site.
Now the doctors are coming forward and saying, yes, we did receive 20 trampled dead bodies.
Site number three is each site's kind of got its own flavor, if you will.
Each site's kind of like its own arena.
Site number three, because it's right in the middle of between site number two and an IDF base, it's very cantalized when the foot traffic from the Morag corridor comes south into the site.
It's very congested.
It's very tight.
The exit is very tight, and the exit is also very constrained with debris, just mounds of rubble.
So when the people are leaving, there's really nowhere for them to go except continuing to be pushed through this small exit.
It is the perfect setting for a stampede of human beings.
It's if it was created for that.
On the 28th of May, site bottleneck.
It is a bottleneck surrounded by razor wire and surrounded by fighting positions where IDF have machine guns.
The United States military doesn't use it because firing a bullet is firing a bullet.
Escalation of force would be, for an example, if I was in Baghdad as a combatant, an actual under Title X authority under the United States Constitution, fighting as a belligerent in war.
I can't just walk up to somebody and be like, oh, that looks like al-Qaeda.
I'm going to shoot them.
There's to be a threat.
And the process of that threat, where unless you are engaged in active combat, you feel a threat.
It's typically you have signage, like, hey, don't go past this point, right?
Oh, well, considering like if I was on an M4 range, you know, I'm shooting at for qualification, I'm shooting out to 300 meters at the furthest pop-up target.
Maximum, like maximum effective range of with that M4 is out to 500, but out to 800 to 1,000 in terms of where the bullet travels with its velocity.
So when UG Solutions says we fire towards the sea, the sea is a big place.
And you know what the sea crashes into?
A beach.
And you know what's along that beach on the coastal road in Gaza?
Hundreds of thousands of civilians.
So when UG Solutions says that our men fire into the air towards the beach, well, thank you again, Mr. Attorney, for just verifying to the world that you are shooting bullets into a crowd of unarmed civilians because what lines the entire coast from north to south of the Mediterranean Sea in Gaza?
I have never experienced, witnessed, been a part of anything that was that uncontrolled, undisciplined, barbaric, immature, and what I would call just a reckless use, reckless endangerment.
We are not dealing with, we're not, first of all, UGS contractors in Gaza are not belligerent combatants.
We did not qualify on our weapon system, which was a requirement in the contract, which is why I brought this up as a point because zeroing your weapon, as you know, you calibrate the weapon to you.
You wouldn't give someone that type of ammunition in a very closed, condensed space like that unless you either had no regard for human life, civilian human life, or you were intentionally trying to kill civilians at distance.
When we were given that ammunition, I thought it was absurd.
I was like, I thought we were going into Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid and we had a weapon only, only to defend ourselves against an imminent threat of death.
Meaning, I don't pull that trigger, not a warning shot, not a celebratory shot.
I do not pull that trigger unless I am directly threatened with the imminent threat of death.
So why are you giving me steel core armor penetrating?
I wouldn't say army piercing, but armor penetrating ammunition that can shoot through sand berms like knife, like a hot knife through butter.
Your job was to provide security at sites where they were passing out food, but you have said that they didn't pass out water because it was too expensive.
How does that work exactly?
Is there a lot of water in Gaza?
And the food you're passing out requires water to cook it, right?
We brought this up on the very first day, and not just myself, other contractors, other people that have a conscience that were like, okay, I see this child or this woman breaking into a box of food, and it's all dried goods, no prepared goods, all dried goods that require water to make, that require effort to make.
There's no water, and we asked that.
And we were told, well, the IDF said no to water.
Well, who's in charge here?
I mean, I thought we were doing the humanitarian aid.
Well, we are, but we're not going to push back on it because water would be three times more expensive per truckload than we can bring in equal to that of three trucks of food.
And more food is better than limiting that for water.
And I'm like, I think someone that was actually educated in humanitarian assistance and providing humanitarian aid and someone that was a nutritionist that was well-versed in feeding people would probably disagree with that.
I'd be willing to take, I think it's a very charitable view.
When I heard him suggest that anyone who criticizes him and his, quote, life-saving work is working for Hamas.
That's where I began to wonder if he was really a good guy, because good people don't immediately deflect in that way and accuse their critics of working for a terror group.
I think that's very inflammatory and bombastic to think that anyone that would speak out against seeing travesty and dehumanization is automatically labeled as Hamas because you don't agree with his perception.
So I don't, you know, I think that others can judge whether Johnny Moore is a good guy, but I don't think he gets the presumption of good guyness after he says something like that.
Again, when there wasn't a cooperative discourse with the IDF in terms of how many trucks, how much food, which sites, which times, it was directed, and there was no conversation.
It was, you will deliver to this site during these times these many trucks.
And not because necessarily that they're bad soldiers, but it's leadership, poor training, poor equipment, this idea that, you know, and part of it is that when you think about the Israeli Defense Force, they're not the Israeli military structure doesn't call themselves an army or a navy or an air force.
They're Israeli defense force.
They defend Israel.
Yes.
They're not expeditionary.
They're not like the United States Army that has to train to fight wars overseas.
They defend within.
And for the most part, they're fighting an enemy now at this point that are women and children and old men.
It's not hard to defeat and annihilate an enemy when your enemy, the majority of them are under the age of 15.
It's almost you have to have a sense of cognitive dissonance to do it.
You almost have to separate yourself from the situation, which is why I've said many of these contractors, if they have a conscience, which I think many of them do because they've served in the military and they know what right and wrong looks like, and in the IDF, that when that separation of that cognitive dissonance between your morals and what you're doing comes back to you as a human, it hits hard.
And in the coming days and weeks, as this operation, as Operation Gideon's chariots has ended and the Israeli army has to refit into this restructuring for occupation, which is a whole new ballgame, occupational army, U.S. Army World War II, U.S. Army post-invasion of Iraq, that's when things get really nasty.
That's when things get really gray.
We think that things are complicated and complex now.
Wait until you put an occupation army onto the streets of Gaza City.
If you don't mind fleshing out the difference between what's going on now and a formal occupation, so right now in the south, so consider if you're a combat force, infantry, armor, tanks, artillery.
You're maneuvering.
You're maneuvering against an enemy.
We're not.
In this case, I didn't see many enemy out there.
I didn't see any enemy out there.
When you're an army of occupation, you then become static.
You become routine.
You become identifiable.
That's when counterinsurgency often resonates the most.
So right now, if I were Hamas, while the active war is going on, the offensive, I'm laying low.
I'm hiding.
I'm going to come out and get killed.
When the occupation begins, that's when the insurgency presents itself in armed violence.
It's going to get violent and it's going to get deadly.
And as the, well, more deadly.
And if the United States doesn't set a firm tone of what's acceptable and what's not, no longer can we have this IDF, do what you will, and we'll just kind of, we'll play back up.
No, we cannot.
The president of the United States needs to set clear, firm expectations and boundaries with our ally.
Because this occupation, two things will happen.
One, it's going to become extremely violent, grotesquely violent.
Markava tanks being blown up on the Salah Addin Road going into Gaza.
The Israelis won't like it.
But then also, when forces begin to go into Gaza City and people, other people start to see the amount of starvation and destitute and destruction.
Half of one truck only feeds a couple hundred people, one meal.
Not to consider what hits the ground and explodes.
Most of it doesn't make it to the ground safely.
So those airdrops were for show.
For the first time in a long time, others besides the Israeli Defense Force Air Force have seen what Gaza looks like from above.
And the Israeli government specifically said no media in the aircraft.
But some of the crew on these aircraft, the Spaniards, the French, the Jordanians, saw that and went back to their governments and were like, this is beyond words.
So when they're conducting equipment drops, in this case, food pallet drops, I mean, it's at a lower altitude.
It's not like it's from, you know, it's not like from 10,000 feet in the air.
No, it's not.
From a lower altitude, which you get a pretty good view of the ground of the ground from above.
And the scale of devastation in Gaza that not that I just, you know, I'm not talking about someone that saw this from the outside or someone that saw pictures or someone that looked at a picture and assessed it.
Rotting bodies, starvation, the body just breaking down.
And when that's en masse, it's overwhelming.
I smelled this same smell once in Baghdad during the 2006 timeframe during the height of the sectarian violence when Sunni and Shia were just slaughtering each other.
And one of our jobs that we had to do during that time was on our patrols, we would take a truck and a trailer and we would load bodies.
Many of veterans have done this.
This is recorded history.
We would load with the Iraqi army.
We would go through neighborhoods and load bodies because they had just been slaughtered.
Families slaughtered.
That smell.
In terms of picking up the bodies?
Yeah.
While in Baghdad in the height of sectarian violence during my very first deployment as a platoon leader, and many a veteran can attest to this because we had to do it.
We would have to move through on our combat patrols.
We would have to take army trucks and trailers with Iraqi army personnel to load up bodies because there were so many.
That smell is something you never forget.
In Gaza, standing on the berm of site number four, looking north to Gaza City.
So if you're standing on site number four and you're looking south, you see Beerish and you see everything to the south towards the Egyptian border.
If you're standing on the northern berm, you're looking at Gaza City, the apocalypse.
It's the only thing I can describe it as.
Well, in the evening, when that coastal wind comes over the Mediterranean and sweeps through and that hits you in the face, it smells like death.
And to that scale, mark my words.
Someone that's seen it, someone that's lived it, someone that's touched it, someone that's felt it.
When the world gets a look at what's in Gaza City and Jabalia and southern Erez on the Gaza side of the border, the world will not tolerate it.
Well, Senator Tillis, you know, as a Republican, his concern is because we have a large constituency of North Carolina, North Carolinians, veterans who are in Gaza, armed on a tourist visa.
So we talked to his staff at his invite, his professional staff that gave notes to him.
But every meeting I had with Congress, whether they were Republican or Democrat, when I sat down and I told them the truth of it, we have Americans, U.S. citizens, veterans that we put into Gaza, armed to stave off a hungry, starving population with no rules of engagement on a tourist visa.
One of the staffers even spit out his coffee when I said it.
Well, anytime, you know, imagine, if you will, if someone came from France to the United States to visit just to see New York City, check out the sites, and they wanted to be here for a few days.
So they would enter, you know, blue passport, bloop, go through, clear, get your little ticket.
You're on a tourist visa.
Imagine coming from France to go check out the big apple, and you're walking around with a fully automatic machine gun, a pistol, a shotgun, and armor-piercing rounds.
Not only do you have legal, not have any legal protection under as the Israeli government, we're there under the good graces of just hoping that, you know, that at some point some Israeli official doesn't see what we're doing and saying, like, that's criminal.
Right now, everybody's just like, just do it because nobody sees it.
But man, are we, I would call it, you know, like back in the day, we're riding dirty.
Except in the Book of Esther, where they're genocided, but whatever.
Excuse me.
Yeah.
Again, did the Americans you were with like having, I don't know if there's beer for sale in Gaza, but whatever you do at night after a long day of watching civilians get shot at distribution centers.
Did anyone say, man, this is this is kind of nuts?
So the contractors that I mostly spent my time with, because remember, I was the, as soon as we got into country, I was promoted to be the Joint Tactical Operations Center team leader.
So I had a small team who predominantly worked out of the Joint Tactical Operations Center.
I had additional duties laid upon me by the leadership of UG Solutions in terms of taking pictures and, you know, being this pseudo-PR person because they had no one to do PR slash this pseudo operations person.
So taking all the pictures, I was told to do in writing.
I didn't take that because it was a hobby.
I had no intention of taking pictures.
Like prior to getting there in my phone, I mean, I still had a flip phone before I went because I wanted to get a new one so I could watch movies on the plane.
In getting there, like the only pictures I had on my phone were like a few from some family stuff.
So all the pictures you showed me, the ones right here with the dates on them, and it's you basically took pictures every single day you were there, it looks like they're all timestamped.
What is important about this day on the 12th of June, which I think is, it would be funny if it wasn't so upsetting, is that all of the pictures that I took every day, go out into the field, take pictures, document.
Let's tell the truth.
Well, the truth that I grew up with is the truth of the truth.
You don't get to, you don't get to cherry pick the truth.
So every picture, every video, everything I took from the good to the bad to the indifferent, when I came back, I uploaded into the, they established a Google share drive for me specifically every day.
That was one of my tasks.
Come back from a site, sit down at the computer, upload the photos and videos, and then wipe them from my phone.
So in the contract, they specifically state that any photos, written experience, pictures or video are the sole proprietary property of UG Solutions.
How you own an idea or a thought, I don't know, but sure.
So I'd upload them and then wipe them, upload them and then wipe them.
So I didn't have them.
On the 11th of June, the Jerusalem Post, which I think is funny because they were also one of the ones that ran the Tony's a liar, which was, it's just absurd to think about it because they, that, that actual news outlet took one of my photos and used it on the front page of their magazine.
It's a, it's on there.
It's a picture of a boy holding a box of aid.
And in fact, John Akri, who was on the press release that GHF did today, asked me if he could use that photo as part of his personal collection because he thought it was so compelling and impactful to tell the story of what was going on in Gaza.
He called me on the phone.
I don't even know who he was.
And I said, yes, you can use it for your personal collection.
So all of my pictures went into this share drive.
That picture made it to the Jerusalem Post.
I got blamed.
Oh, you sent your picture out to the media.
I was like, I didn't send the picture out to the media.
I don't even have them.
So I email the chief operations officer, like, hey, John, can you clarify this?
Because I'm kind of getting some heat.
And he does.
And he clarifies, hey, that he says, you know, it wasn't you that did it.
It was, you know, we'll read it.
So I'm not a good employee.
Gentlemen, and this is to all the leadership of UG Solutions.
Tony, you've done a great job of taking photos and videos, which have been an asset.
We know you've kept those internal and point-to-point with me and me only.
The issue we had is that one of our Israeli political folks at the highest level, who we believe had compartmentalized access to certain materials that we owned, that we agreed to share, turns out, he accessed the photos and now he has them all.
Well, we have told him to explicitly not share these.
He has shared these with the media and we have no control over the photos.
We have since shut down access to only UG personnel.
Apologies if this caused any consternation.
We know you're fully aligned to policy.
Bottom line, we attempted to fulfill a request from our Israeli partners and they took advantage of us and took advantage of us upon themselves without coordination to their government and higher headquarters.
And now all of the media, meaning pictures and photos, are out.
Funny is that days later when I got back to the United States, I got all of my videos and pictures back that I took from an Israeli citizen.
So what this whole smear campaign sounds like to me is I'm the only person in their entire construct of a company that one has the depth of knowledge that I have of what actually happened and what's going on, but two, can corroborate as an eyewitness, as a human being, as a carbon-based life form, having been on the ground in Gaza to corroborate all of the video.
The video of the guy shooting and then saying, yeehaw, hell yeah, you think you got one?
That was in that drive that got released to the Israeli government.
Do we know anything about what happened to his body, whether his family knows where Johnny Moore, who claims to be this evangelical last time I checked, you know, we should know every hair on one's head, God does.
In their smear package of information, they said, Mr. Aguilar claims that this young boy was killed on the site.
Well, here's a picture of him two days later.
The picture that they used of Amir two days later, and also the pictures of Amir, are pictures that I took.
They used photos that I took to discredit photos that I took.
You can't even wrap your head around it.
So the picture here that they said is Amir is on the 1st of June at site number four, timestamped in my phone because I have the original.
Site number four and site number two are 26 kilometers away through a combat zone that no civilian can traverse between the two.
So how did Amir get from site two on the 28th of May to site four on the 1st of June?
Well, he didn't.
One, because he's dead.
Two, because it would have been impossible unless somewhere in Gaza they now have the ability to, you know, Star Trek bean people to another location.
Now, Johnny Moore would say that's Hamas propaganda.
So, Tony Aguilar, who has no contacts really anywhere, who's back in the United States, managed to orchestrate this Hamas kabuki theater facade simply to discredit the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
How arrogant must you be?
This is a Christian?
This is a Christian evangelist?
This boy was killed.
And instead of accepting what we can do to change it, I have a great recommendation.
Let's not put humanitarian aid food distribution sites in the middle of combat zones.
That would be a great start to not killing innocent people to include.
Don't put food distribution centers in the middle of combat zones.
So my last question is: what other steps should the U.S. government take to make this better and to avoid what you have said a number of times is going to be an international cataclysm when the world sees what's going on in Gaza that the U.S. is supporting and asking for?
I mean, his entire life and background has just been PR.
It's insulting.
But Mr. John Akri has said, we would like to propose a plan for the UN and for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to work together.
No.
No.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation does not have the capacity.
It does not have the logistics.
It does not have the experience.
It does not have the personnel to do half part or any part of the humanitarian assistance operation.
What the United States should do is stop with this rhetoric that the United Nations is giving away all of its food to Hamas.
That has been disproven.
Disproven.
Re-engage the United Nations.
Take all that money that we're giving to line the pockets of profiteers who spend most of it on PR firms and spokespersons and lawyers, apparently, and allow the United Nations to use it to not only expand their operations, but this would be a really good idea.
Instead of the IDF sitting and just videotaping and watching UN trucks getting ransacked, perhaps provide some security for them.
Just like, so I think it's ironic when Johnny Moore celebrates that not one of our trucks has been attacked.
Well, you have them driving on a road that's in an area where there are no Palestinians that live within tens of miles, armed to the teeth by IDF and armed Americans.
Of course, they're not getting ransacked.
It's almost like you're in the stands of the football field and you're saying, well, I didn't get tackled today.
You're not even on the field.
So how about we provide some security assistance to the United Nations to go into these sites?
Not arming or armed security, just a security presence to assist them in delivery.
To empower the United Nations that has doctors and nurses and humanitarian assistants and nutritionists and people that feed people and people that know what they're doing and people that know how many calories come in a meal and how many calories someone needs that can provide water.
I have never had any contact from anyone within the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation at all, period, ever.
So the fact that they can so bodaciously say that I'm a liar and they've never even spoke to me.
It's pretty bold.
I don't know of other than Mr. Johnny Moore and Mr. Chapman Faye, the spokesman, I have no idea what human beings are in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking with everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics with the wars when the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
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