retired US Army Green Beret Anthony Aguilar
© BBC"I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force," said retired US Army Green Beret Anthony Aguilar
A retired US Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel who worked as a contractor at an aid distribution point in Gaza has gone on-the-record with claims that he personally witnessed war crimes perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces and by American contractors working for the shadowy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

"I witnessed the Israeli forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians," Anthony Aguilar told BBC. "I witnessed the Israeli forces firing a main gun tank round from the Merkava tank into a crowd of people, destroying a car of civilians that was simply driving away from the site. I witnessed mortar rounds being fired at the crowd... to keep them controlled."

The GHF is led by an evangelical Christian leader with close ties to Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump. The organization was established in Israel in a collaboration of American evangelicals and private security contractors. Soon after the GHF began distributing aid to war-torn Gaza in May, disturbing reports emerged of Israeli soldiers killing unarmed Palestinians approaching aid points for food. Reports of dozens of Palestinians being killed in single incidents have become common. Last week, the UN human rights office said more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to receive food at the distribution points.

Aguilar was blunt in characterizing what he observed in the context of his US military service:
"In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population...an unarmed, starving population. I've never witnessed that in all the places I've been deployed to war until I was in Gaza, at the hands of the IDF and US contractors ... Without question, I witnessed war crimes."
He also condemned the GHF and its hired American guns:
"My professional opinion of how the sites were established was what I would describe as 'amateur.' Inexperienced, untrained, no idea of how to conduct operations of this magnitude. That would be my most benign assessment. In my most frank assessment, I would say that they're criminal."
The GHF said Aguilar's allegations were "categorically false," telling BBC that the retired Green Beret is "a disgruntled former contractor who was terminated for misconduct." In a separate statement, GHF said its own investigation concluded his claims are "false and have no basis in reality."


However, Aguilar's description of lethal weapons being used to control unarmed civilian crowds is consistent with recent accounts given by IDF soldiers and other US contractors. Here's how one of several IDF soldiers and officers described the senseless killing in an exposé published by Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
"It's a killing field. Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force - no crowd-control measures, no tear gas - just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire."
"We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces. I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons."
There are also many videos circulating on social media that corroborate claims of lethal weapons being used to control crowds. This one was included in the BBC's new report, with the network saying it verified the footage:

The IDF said it would review Aguilar's allegations. Meanwhile, responding to a widening uproar over massacres at food sites and rising malnutrition and starvation in blockaded Gaza, the IDF early on Sunday announced it had begun making food airdrops, describing them as part of "a series of actions aimed at improving the humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip."