Anthony Aguilar’s extraordinary assertions about Israel lack even ordinary evidence.
M aybe you have never heard the name Anthony Aguilar before. Perhaps you enjoyed a blessed ignorance about his work and political outlook. Well, your luck is about to run out. Aguilar may soon become a mainstream media sensation. Among those who devote themselves to broadcasting calumnious allegations against Israel, he already is.
Aguilar is “a retired Special Forces Green Beret” and a Purple Heart awardee, Senator Bernie Sanders observed. “He took a contract helping to distribute aid in Gaza. There, he witnessed atrocities committed using American taxpayer dollars.”
Sanders’s similarly, if not equally, anti-Israel colleague, Senator Chris Van Hollen, also promoted Aguilar as a vehicle to retail the notion that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “has been using food as a weapon of war — with complicity from Trump [and] U.S. taxpayer dollars.”
The hosts of the Breaking Points podcast, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, lent their platform to Aguilar, who described what he alleged were Israeli war crimes and the U.S.-Israel charity group Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s complicity in them.
And, of course, Aguilar found a perch for himself on Tucker Carlson’s show. There, the host who just cannot stand talking about Israel, and would rather discuss anything other than the perfidious Jews, devoted yet another episode to the notion that Jerusalem and its American allies are complicit in a strategically incoherent, one-dimensionally wicked plot to starve the Gazan people into submission.
What motivates the Netanyahu government to act in ways that substantiate the allegation that Hamas and its abettors in the United Nations have consistently (and falsely) promoted from almost the outset of the war that began on October 7 — that Israel is engineering a famine in Gaza? Few dare to speculate. Aguilar certainly won’t. All he can do is bear witness to Israel’s crimes and those of the GHF, which he is uniquely positioned to elaborate on having once served as a security contractor for the organization.
In one of his many interviews, this time with Israeli activists and Netanyahu-skeptical journalists, Aguilar alleged that the Israel Defense Forces may have fired into civilian crowds around the GHF aid distribution sites. He didn’t see the fire, but he heard it. “They’re shooting to control the population that’s along the Morag Corridor. And as they’re doing that, they’re shooting into this crowd,” he told his interlocutors, “and Palestinians, civilians, human beings, are dropping to the ground, getting shot.” One of the victims was a young boy he had just come to know, and who “got nothing but scraps” from the GHF’s meager offerings. The charity group, its former employee alleged, is, thus, “complicit in war crimes.”
“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,” Aguilar told the BBC.
That’s Aguilar’s side of the story. The GHF tells quite another about their disgruntled former contractor.
In a document that consists almost entirely of Aguilar’s communications with the organization’s leadership, the self-styled whistleblower concedes that his relationship with GHF was discontinued by his contractor, and he begged for his position back and threatened the outfit when its leaders declined. It also shows that Aguilar, just days prior to his contract’s termination, evinced none of the convictions he is now promulgating on anti-Israel platforms.
In addition, the GHF accuses its former contractor of falsifying documents and presenting “misleading videos to push a false narrative” about his onetime employer. Aguilar insists he circulated a document within the organization accusing it of failing to observe best humanitarian practices on May 29, before his termination. But GHF spokesperson Chapin Fay showed rather conclusively that, as indicated by the document’s metadata, it was circulated nearly one month later, despite its backdating — well after Aguilar was dismissed “for poor performance, volatile conflicts with staff, and erratic behavior.”
Aguilar, while working for GHF’s security contractor, UG Solutions, spent “more than half of that time . . . in a hotel in Israel instead of on the ground at the distribution sites,” Fay added. “Not only did the events that he recounted never happen, but he wasn’t even in the right place or at the right time to have seen the things that he claims to have seen.”
That’s not character assassination — it’s evidence. And yet some will dismiss the ample indications that Aguilar is prosecuting a professional grievance because the evidence does not directly contradict the allegations against Israel, the GHF, and its security contractors. The appearance of motive and the indications of fabricated evidence would impugn this witness’s testimony were this a court of law. But it’s not.
Still, those who retain the capacity for rationality when it comes to Israel might consider the eagerness of Hamas and its allies in international institutions like the United Nations to discredit the GHF not long after its inception. U.N. officials accused Israel and the GHF of “exposing people to death and injury” while seeking to access aid from the moment the initiative began. Israel and its American partners were accused of “engineered scarcity” from the jump. Those who are somehow less responsible communicators than even U.N. bureaucrats alleged that the IDF and UG Solutions used the GHF’s aid sites as traps — lures into which the Palestinian people were drawn, as a matter of policy, only so they could be massacred.
The outcry just happened to coincide with Israel’s decision to block the U.N. from the Strip following the collapse of a spring cease-fire. The Netanyahu government’s goal was to sever Hamas’s control over its people, the source of which springs from the U.N.’s distribution of aid to the terror group. Hamas controls what it does not steal outright, and uses the aid to extort the Gazan people — sometimes occasioning riotous displays of dissent. But when Israel attempted to relax this understandable but poorly executed tactic, the U.N. balked. The U.N. claims it would not distribute aid through Israeli-guaranteed security corridors. The IDF suggests that the U.N. held aid hostage to force Israel to shift its tactical posture in ways the U.N. wanted.
Maybe the timing of Aguilar’s decision — to promulgate the very narrative for which anti-Israel audiences have hungered only after his termination, and even though, by all indications, he was a supporter of GHF’s work — is pure coincidence. But like the ubiquitous claim that Israel is engineering a famine in Gaza, the assertion that the GHF’s shortcomings (such as they are, having distributed 100 million meals to Gaza’s 2 million people in just eight weeks) are the result of willful malice is an extraordinary claim. It should be supported with equally extraordinary evidence. Aguilar’s suspect testimony doesn’t rise to that level.