The US is complicit in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to Anthony Aguilar, a retired Green Beret who served in the US Army for 25 years and worked in Gaza for the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Aguilar has blown the whistle on the GHF after witnessing Israeli soldiers and US contractors fire on crowds of unarmed, hungry Palestinians at GHF aid sites. “What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland,” he told Democracy Now in an interview that aired on Tuesday.
“We — we, the United States — are complicit. We are involved, hand in hand, in the atrocities and the genocide that is currently undergoing in Gaza,” Aguilar said.
In a conversation with US Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Aguilar recalled a young boy who trekked miles to reach a GHF site with no shoes and picked up what little food supplies he could find on the ground. “He was so thankful for even that, then he walked up to me and I beckoned him to come forward and he grabbed my hand and kissed my hand and he said shukran, shukran (thank you),” Aguilar told the senator.
After the boy, whose name was Amir, left the GHF site, Aguilar said he was killed by the IDF. “The IDF opened up with machine gun fire into the crowd to get them to leave faster, to get them to hurry. Shooting at their foot, shooting over their heads, shooting into the berm … so I ran up to the berm to look, and there were dead Palestinians. He was one of them,” Aguilar said, pointing to a photo of Amir.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Aguilar said that he witnessed IDF troops fire tank rounds and artillery shells into crowds of unarmed Palestinians.
Aguilar told Democracy Now that the four GHF sites in Gaza were set up so that the unarmed crowds of Palestinians were forced to walk through combat zones. “The sites were designed to lure, bait, aid, and kill,” he said, adding that they weren’t distributing nearly enough food for Gaza’s starving population.
Aguilar told Sen. Van Hollen that during his 25-year Army career, he served in 12 combat deployments, including in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. He told the BBC that he never “witnessed the level of brutality” that he saw in Gaza.
The GHF has accused Aguilar of lying and claims that he was fired, but Aguilar denies the accusation and says he terminated his own contract. ” I wasn’t fired. I resigned because I could no longer be a part of it,” he told Democracy Now.
Van Hollen and 20 other Senate Democrats sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday urging the US to cut off funding to the GHF and support pre-existing UN-led aid channels. “The US government must stop facilitating the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation operations and use US leverage to urge the Netanyahu government to revert to the UN-led mechanism, both for the safety and well-being of Palestinians in Gaza and to preserve humanitarian principles that have existed for decades,” the senators said.
Since the GHF began operating in Gaza at the end of May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to get aid. According to UN numbers released on July 23, at least 766 were killed near GHF sites.
