Former Green Beret: The IDF is the GHF’s ‘client’

In an interview published yesterday with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), former Green Beret Anthony Aguilar, who served as a private contractor with the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was told “to [his] face,” that the Israeli Defense Forces are GHF’s “client.”

During the interview, Aguilar told Van Hollen that he witnessed an intense situation while working control room duty as a contractor, where an IDF soldier, over the radio, instructed contractors at the site to shoot at children at the aid hub. Aguilar responded that shooting should not occur; the children left the site before anything happened.

But after the incident, a higher-up from Safe Reach Solutions, a private firm overseeing GHF aid operations and bringing American contractors to work at them, disciplined Aguilar, telling him to never say no to the client — the IDF.

“The Chief Operations Officer for Safe Reach Solutions, our higher headquarters, so to speak, in the contract, beckoned me outside with him. And he looked at me in the face, and he said: ‘Never say no to the client,’” Aguilar told Van Hollen. “And I asked him, I was like, ‘I didn't know the client was in there. Who's here? Did [GHF Director] Johnnie Moore come to visit?’”

“And he said, ‘No, the IDF.’ I was like, ‘The IDF — our client?’ He said, ‘Yes, we work for them.’”

Aguilar also said he saw the IDF frequently fire indiscriminately at Palestinians at the aid hubs — with guns, but also even with tanks and missiles. "I have witnessed... the Israeli Defense Forces firing into the crowds of the Palestinians: firing over their head, firing at their feet, firing into the crowd. Not just with rifles or machine guns, but tanks, tank rounds, artillery, mortars, missiles.”

“Not because they were combatants, or because they were hostile, or because they were Hamas, but simply as a means to control the crowd,” Aguilar explained. He said he also saw U.S. contractors shoot at Palestinians at the hubs, even when they clearly posed no threat.

Notably, Aguilar told Van Hollen that the contractors were in Gaza on tourist visas to Israel, with little guidance regarding their rules of engagement. “We [contractors] are in the country of Israel, in Gaza, carrying weapons…and we are there on a tourist visa,” he said.

“If my grandmother wanted to go visit Jerusalem, she would go into Israel in the same way that I did as a contractor with a gun.”

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is challenging Aguilar’s allegations with a collection of sworn statements from Aguilar’s former colleagues, who dispute his claims.