On June 6, Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year US Army veteran and Green Beret, found himself facing a daunting logistical problem. He had been recruited as a security contractor for UG Solutions, a partner of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—the Israel-backed American nonprofit now overseeing food distribution in the devastated Palestinian territory. His challenge: finding a way to feed the local Palestinian workers assisting with GHF’s efforts. “Nobody could figure out how to get food there,” he says.
So Aguilar says they settled on a workaround: ordering stacks of Domino’s pizzas via an Israeli delivery app and picking them up at the Gaza border themselves. “We then took those 27 pizzas in an armored convoy,” he says, to a GHF distribution site within the strip.
For Aguilar, it was a striking example of systemic failures at GHF, “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning,” he says. “It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic.”
Aguilar has been speaking out about what he witnessed while working with GHF in May and June, adding to the controversy about the organization’s role in Gaza’s emerging famine. Recently, he sat down with France 24’s Jessica Le Masurier, who, along with Mother Jones, is publishing excerpts from an on-camera interview with Aguilar about his experiences.
The United Nations accuses the private organization of militarizing aid operations. Its Office of the High Commissioner for...
Two months after deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles, US President Donald Trump has sent 800 National Guard troops into the American capital. On Monday, he placed the city's police departm...