The following articles, from Part 1 to Part 5, are transcriptions from the interview video between TRT World (hosted by Paul Salvatory) and Anthony Aguilar, Former Green Beret and Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) worker, shared via TRT World's YouTube channel with the title "Palestine Talks: Anthony Aguilar on 'powerful people' getting rich from Gaza genocide - The GHF is 'not in Gaza to feed anyone", published on Oct 10, 2025, available on: https://youtu.be/UZMugQ22dKk?si=EH9xWsfn2oACZmo6. This Selamat Pagi Gaza Website has no affiliation with the TRT World at all, it only shares the interview in a form of text due to the importance of the conversation in it. Everyone who cares about the future and humanity should watch the video as soon as possible. Hopefully the channel doesn't mind I share it here in the form of text.
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Part 1. They killed civilians in Gaza using tourist visa
Paul Salvatory: So, thank you so much, Anthony, for sitting here with me today to talk about a few things, your work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or the GHF and seeing its crimes in Gaza and perhaps how your own view has changed with respect to the United States since you've been in Gaza. But before we get into all these things in earnest, I'm wondering if you could just give us a bit of a backstory as to how you got to Gaza, how you were invited there.
Anthony Aguilar: So, I recently ended my 25 year military career as a Green Beret in the United States Army this past year in the early 2025 March time frame, and UG Solutions, who is the security apparatus within the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, called me. They were looking to recruit former members of the military, either retired or recently gotten out, that had a special operations background, to be hired as a security contractor to secure and deliver food aid into Gaza. So, that's how I became involved directly in the mission or the project in Gaza under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, was through being an employee of UG Solutions.
Paul: And at the time that they contacted you, did they tell you that this was a humanitarian mission but you would also be armed? And was there a red flag in your mind?
Anthony: So the explanation that was given to me and I assume to all of those that were recruited, I don't know the discussions that were had with all recruits, but the discussion that was had with me was that the mission would be to take over what the United Nations mission had been in providing humanitarian aid, humanitarian assistance into Gaza. And my understanding, just having known prior to being called to be recruited, was that the United Nations under UNRWA and other non-government organizations working through the UN had over 400 distribution sites throughout Gaza from the south to the north, west to the east, in Gaza city, in Jabalia, in Bayt Hanoon, in all of the areas and the delivery of over 500 trucks every day. So, I was going in with an understanding that we were going to take over that scale of an operation, and that being armed. They did tell us that we were going to be armed, but with the notion that we were going to be armed for our security, for protection of our lives, that we were armed with the inherent right of self-defense, but that was it much like, you would consider: a bank truck driving to load ATM machines, the driver and the security guard in that truck are armed, they're armed to protect their life if need be, they're not armed to go out and do police operations. So, I understood the premise of being armed in the situation under the understanding that we were there only with the inherent right to defend ourselves. And that is not what the reality was and what it devolved into being once we were all in Gaza.
Paul: And, so, how long after that did you actually get to Gaza? Did you have to go through Israel first?
Anthony: Yes. So all operations for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the work in Gaza is staged within Israel. Everything that happens, you know, from Israel into Gaza, into Gaza, out of Gaza, back to Israel. There are no GHF operations that are permanent in Gaza. It's in and out, transient type of thing. So I got called on the 13th of May. That's the first I had heard about the mission and UG Solutions involvement in the mission. And then the kind of the timeline given to me was like: if you want to work this contract, we need to know by tomorrow being the 14th of May. And I was like: "that's pretty quick timeline, today's the 13th, when is this mission going to start?" [The recruiter answered] "Oh, Saturday. You'll be on a plane Saturday to Israel." That was 4 days. So, from being notified to being offered the job to signing a contract to getting myself to Dallas, Virginia, to flying out on an airplane, four and a half days, and then, I was in Israel.
Paul: And, when you got there, did you see red flags right away or did that take some time like days in or...?
Anthony: I actually saw what I would call red flags, maybe at the time, some red warning lights, not necessarily red flags yet, during the interview process when I asked: "what's our legal status, when we go in, obviously, when we go in into Israel, and from Israel going into Gaza, what is our legal protective status?" Because what listeners need to know is that the United States or the United Nations or NATO or any type of other entity is not operating in Gaza or within Israel under any type of military authority. From the United States perspective, that would be: we aren't there under Title 10 Authority of the US Constitution, meaning military authority. We don't have a status of forces agreement with Israel in Gaza to conduct any type of protective or defensive operation. My concern was once we get into Israel, what is our legal status? Are we going to have a government invite type of visa? Are we going to be there as augmentation to the Israeli government with legal protection? And they didn't know the answer to that. The recruiter that was talking to me said, "I'm not sure, but we'll find that out before you go." I was like: "That's kind of important." What the red red warning light, what then came to me a red flag was that when we entered Israel, we entered on a tourist visa. We entered the country on a tourist visa, therefore conducting operations in Gaza, armed with automatic weapons and machine guns and tear gas and stung grenades and pepper spray, driving in armored vehicles, on a tourist visa. So, that was the first red flag. And there were others in terms of the organization of the mission. A rules of engagement was not provided. We were not provided with kind of what I would call a mission brief on what we were going to be doing. It was just, it was more so thrown at us in terms of: we're just going to take it day by day and, "oh by the way today (the 24th of May) we're going into Gaza". It was very haphazard and very unorganized and when I actually went into Gaza on the 24th of May and went to the actual distribution sites where we would be delivering food aid to, that's when kind of the red flags turned into alarms, and seeing where the sites were built and how we would be servicing these sites.
Paul: And you commented before that Palestinians to get the food they have to go through these areas that are extremely dangerous.
Anthony: That's right.
Paul: Are set up, so they're shot at. Could you speak a bit about that? And also like, who exactly is doing the shooting physically? Who is doing the shooting?
Anthony: So, humanitarian principles in conducting humanitarian assistance, humanitarian aid, or humanitarian operations should follow four very specific and sacred principles of doing that. One: that it be done unilaterally. Meaning, it's not one country or another doing it. It's a unilateral entities like the UN. That it should be done independently. So, unilaterally of being in supportive of some military's operation, unilaterally in terms of how it's done by the mechanism that's doing it. You shouldn't be taking orders from an army, the Israeli government in this case. And that it (humanitarian assistance) addresses the need at hand. If you're going into an area and the population is starving, you don't need to bring children's toys and blankets. You have to address the acute need. And then finally, safeguard the population. That is a hallmark of humanitarian aid. You must safeguard the population. The distribution sites, what they call SDS's or secure distribution site, there were four. Now, there are only two. There were four when we first started. At those distribution sites, they were built and constructed by the Israeli military, by the Israeli Defense Force. That's not independent and unilateral. They shouldn't have been constructed by the Israeli Defense Forces. The way that they were established were built as military positions, not humanitarian distribution positions, where they were built physically in the entire, in all of Palestine, in the entire geographical area of Palestine, where there were once 400 sites and now only four, all to the south of the Netzarim corridor, and three of those were south of the Morag corridor along the Egyptian border. For any Palestinian to reach sites one, two or three, they had to travel through, they had to traverse through the ongoing offensive operations of Operation Gideon's Chariots. At the time, this operation started in March, Operation Gideon's Chariots was designed to clear all of the south and central part of Gaza. So by that point, by the time we started distribution operations in late May, any Palestinian that lived or was living south of the Morag corridor in Rafah had been pushed north into the UN encampments in central Gaza. There was no one living south of the Morag corridor. So any Palestinian that needed to come to these sites to get food was forced to travel through on foot, often great distances, 10 to 12 km one way, in order to get to the food site. So where the food site was purposely built, a Palestinian would have to travel through an active offensive combat zone. Not a "war zone", if you consider all of Gaza a war zone, but an active operational offensive combat area, in order to get to the food. That violates the principles of humanitarian assistance. That violates international humanitarian law. That violates Protocol 4 of the Geneva Convention and these are black and white. This isn't speculation. These are you cannot do that. So to me, those were some initial alarms just before we even started distribution, looking at how the sites were built, where they were built raised immediate concerns for me in terms of the operation being conducted in a humanitarian way, or within the the scope of international humanitarian law.
Paul: Right. And, the Israeli military itself, is it working with the contractors? And are they the ones who are doing the actual shooting when Palestinians cross into that area?
Anthony: So, when you see, there's been, in addition to my eyewitness testimony, the eyewitness testimony of many doctors and UN workers that're in Gaza, reporters that haven't been killed, the reporters that was coming out of Gaza, showing shooting into the crowds as the crowd of Palestinians are coming to the site or leaving the site, the shooting that's often seen that results in quite a few deaths in the magnitude of thousands now, at or near the sites, is the IDF. Machine gun fire, tank fire, artillery fire, mortar rounds being fired, and I've witnessed all of these, I have seen it, witnessed it, and captured it on camera of mortar rounds being fired over the population, tank rounds being fired into the crowd, machine guns from the Markava tank being fired into the crowd. On the sites themselves, when the Palestinians come to the distribution site to get the food, there is no distribution method. There isn't a organized distribution procedure. The food is piled up and in a big pile and they release the line of 8 to 10,000. On the very first day of distribution on the 27th of May, we had 34,000 starving Palestinians rushing to the site. That's uncontrollable. That's unmanageable. A normal operating day, if you will, of distribution, 8 to 10,000 Palestinians released from a release point, all coming to the site at one time, in one large massive group being funneled onto this distribution site with one entrance and one exit. And while there were on the sites, the use of pepper spray, tear gas, stun grenades, non-lethal rubber shotgun shells, munitions, and at times live ammunition, lethal ammunition being fired was from UG Solutions personnel, Americans, on these sites, and sometimes from the site into the immediate vicinity around where the crowds were, as a way to disperse the crowds, so you had lethal munitions being fired from the IDF, more so from the IDF, but also from UG Solutions contractors on the sites.
Paul: So, the contractors, are they being tasked essentially to shoot, to kill?
Anthony: So, what is very nefarious about the presence of the UG solutions contractors in Gaza is that nobody, none of the leadership, would take accountability for actions and how things were supposed to be. So, going back to our entry into Gaza on a tourist visa, under that tourist visa, we had no connection to GHF at all. In fact, they said, you know, you're not here doing this, this, and this, you're just here as a tourist. No connection to the company that we worked for or GHF. That provides, you know, the ability to say: "Oh, we we didn't have any part of that." So, this plausible deniability built into the process.
TRT World, https://youtu.be/UZMugQ22dKk?si=EH9xWsfn2oACZmo6